In any list of the great filmmakers who have contributed most to the possibilities of cinema, Agnès Varda must appear pretty high up. I have been meaning to watch this film for a long time and I feel a fool for leaving it so long before deciding to go ahead. From the opening titles this is a work of genius. It is informative, penetrating in its analysis and also fun to watch. Varda was 72 when the film was released but the film explores new technologies in creative ways and its subject matter is topical still, 24 years later. Varda is a role model for anyone who gets past 70 and thinks there isn’t much more to do. She had another near twenty years of productive life after shooting this in film in 1999-2000 before her death in 2019, aged 90. The French title of the film is more intriguing than the English translation – as is often the case.
There are two dictionary definitions of ‘glean’ or rather two slightly different interpretations of the same meaning. Originally the term was used to describe the process of collecting the odd grains that were left on the ground after a crop was harvested. That meaning still survives but the term is also used to mean the small pieces of information that are collected and pieced together to make a news report or any other form of analysis. The Jamaican newspaper title ‘The Gleaner’ has always stuck in my brain for some reason. A ‘gleaner’ is also simply a person who ‘gleans’. In her film, Varda is also interested in the art history of the depiction of gleaners. She is intrigued by the fact that most gleaners are women in fine art and she refers to the fact that it is often women in groups in the crop fields but occasionally there is a single woman, ‘La glaneuse’, as in the Jules Breton painting of 1860 or the earlier ‘Small gleaner, sitting in a field’ of c. 1853. But Varda herself is also a gleaner in the second sense – a gleaner with her camera. Her films are so rich that we must look for every small detail and understand how she puts them together to create her narratives. In this case she will make a powerful statement about the failure of our economics, our social relations and our ecological analysis and its impact on the poorest people in our society. At the same time she will celebrate with the gleaners she finds and sate her own endless curiosity about the world.
In 1999, the use of small, lightweight digital video recorders in mainstream filmmaking was only just beginning. One of the first significant films that used the new technology was the first ‘Dogme’ film, Festen (The Celebration, Denmark 1998), directed by Thomas Vinterberg. The new technology sacrificed a high definition image for a faster shoot and a grittier feel of relationships between family members and friends, which could be filmed with a hand-held camera and capture interactions not possible with conventional film camera set-ups. Varda adopted the same approach with her small video camcorder (a Sony TRV900 Mini DV Camcorder) which she showed on-screen and used in various ways. I found that the image was less defined on my computer screen but looked fine on my Smart TV via MUBI and Apple TV.
Varda worked with a small crew and began to tour both rural and urban districts around France in 1999. She found that modern agricultural methods meant that mechanised digging up of potatoes missed several tons of crops and that of the potatoes initially taken by the mechanical, the largest and any damaged or misshapen tubers were discarded. As an allotment potato grower I find this shocking. Fortunately French law makes gleaning legal after any harvest of traditional crops. Varda even persuades a lawyer in court regalia to confirm this by reading from the Penal Code – or perhaps it is an actor? The potato pickers are in the North in the region of Beauce in the Eure-et-Loir départment. I’m intrigued to learn that this highly fertile region was the setting for Zola’s novel, La Terre. Varda also travels south to Provence and then across to Burgundy to find something similar in the wine-growing regions, though the owners of the high value ‘terroirs’ seem to have the right to restrict gleaning of grapes. She also visits the gleaners of the oysters on the Vendée coast of Western France. The oysters that are washed of the official oyster beds by storms are available for gleaners but with elaborate sets of rules which seem to be fairly amicably interpreted. All of the places that Varda and her team visited are listed on IMDb.
The other half of the film is spent in museums and art galleries, large and small and also market places after trading has finished and trash bins at the end of the day outside food stores. Here, there do seem to be rights to glean as well, although one supermarket owner bleaches the food he trashes which seems extremely mean and wasteful. Varda loves collecting ‘found items’. She was once primarily a photographer and she has always been an artist, so she repurposes her findings in interesting ways. And if you are a cat lover, fear not because Varda’s cats are present as usual. Zgougou and Bernard make an appearance and steal the show for a few moments.
Nearly a quarter of a century later this documentary still seems very topical. Varda, without using a didactic approach, simply presents us with all the evidence to understand how we have lost the a sense of the direct relationship between food and humanity, how we have allowed a consumer society to steal our understanding of the need to build an inclusive society which can also thrive in a world of limited resources. In one of the most moving sequences Varda focuses on an educated man who lives in the city on what he gleans each day and in the evenings teaches language skills to migrant workers. The symbol of this film is probably the potatoes formed in the shape of a heart which Varda finds discarded in the fields. Later she will make them the centre of an art installation. There is a second Gleaners film because Varda got such a strong response to the first one. She decides to find some of the people who sent her mini-works of art and to re-visit some of the gleaners she met for the first film. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse . . deux ans après (2002) is a 63 minute film, usually included on the disc for the first film. I’ve watched the opening but I’m going to save the rest for whenever I need a blast of Varda to blow away the troubles of the world. The Gleaners and I is available on many of the usual streaming and rental sites.
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