The Gleaners and I  

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The Gleaners and I (Template:Lang-fr; "The gleaners and the female gleaner", a reference to the director herself) is a 2000 French documentary film by Agnès Varda that features various kinds of gleaning. It was entered into competition at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival ("Official Selection 2000"), and later went on to win awards around the world. In a 2014 Sight and Sound poll, film critics voted The Gleaners and I the eighth best documentary film of all time. In 2016, the film appeared at No. 99 on BBC's list of the 100 greatest films of the 21st century.

Contents

The subjects

The film tracks a series of gleaners as they hunt for food, knicknacks, thrown away items, and personal connection. Varda travels the French countryside as well as the city to find and film not only field gleaners, but also urban gleaners and those connected to gleaners, including a wealthy restaurant owner whose ancestors were gleaners. The film spends time capturing the many aspects of gleaning and the many people who glean to survive. One such person is the teacher named Alain, an urban gleaner with a master's degree who teaches French to immigrants.

Varda's other subjects include artists who incorporate recycled materials into their work, symbols she discovers during her filming (including a clock without hands and a heart-shaped potato), and the French laws regarding gleaning versus abandoned property. Varda also spends time with Louis Pons, who explains how junk is a "cluster of possibilities."

In order to find the subjects Varda claimed her method was to ask all the people she knew to talk to everyone - "the peasants, the owners, the farmers, the fruit growers - about our film. I said to my assistant, "Call everybody you know." The result of these subjects, Varda stated that "The more l met them, the more I could see I had nothing to make as a statement. They make the statement; they explain the subject better than anybody."

This film has an unexpected brief interview with the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, plus follow-up segments on some of the featured people.

Production

Varda describes her filming and writing process as cinecriture: the process of writing narration, choosing shots, encountering subjects, editing, choosing music is “all chance working with me, all this is the film writing that I often talk about.” She describes in the press kit for the film that she and her team would travel and shoot for roughly two weeks at a time and immediately proceed to edit while scouting for additional locations. Gleaners was filmed throughout France, in Beauce, Jura, Provence, the Pyrenees and in the suburbs of Paris. She says the entire process took place between September 1999 and April 2000. Varda traveled alone to get most of her “gleaned” shots, scouting markets between 2 and 4 p.m. Most of the abandoned objects and shots she found, including the “dancing lens cap” and the heart-shaped potato, were “[strokes] of luck—and we immediately filmed it.”

Varda produced The Gleaners and I under Cine-Tamaris, the company she founded in 1954 and that has produced most of her previous films. Gleaners was distributed by Zeitgeist Films in New York, a company that has distributed films from such directors as Christopher Nolan and the Brothers Quay.

Technique

The film is notable for its use of a hand-held camera and for its unusual camera angles and techniques. In one particular scene Varda, the filmmaker, forgets to turn off her camera. As the camera hangs to her side the filming proceeds, and the viewer can see the shifting ground and the dangling lens cap with a jazz music background. Varda calls this shot "The Dance of the Lens Cap".

In The Gleaners and I, Varda films herself combing her newly discovered gray hair, and there are many visuals of her aging hands. In one scene, she "catches" trucks on the freeway, forming a circle with her hand in front of the camera framing the truck in the center, then closing her hand as she drives past them.

Much of this footage is woven into the film to show that Varda, as a film maker, is also a gleaner. This concept is made explicit in the French title, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, which could be translated as "the gleaners and the gleaneress".


See also

Notes

  • Ebert, Roger. "The Gleaners and I." rogerebert.com. rogerebert.com, 11 May 2001. Web. 20 Nov 2010.
  • "The Gleaners and I." IMDbPro. Amazon.com, Inc, n.d. Web. 6 Nov 2010.
  • "Official Selection 2000." Festival de Cannes. Festival de Cannes, n.d. Web. 20 Nov 2010.
  • "Press Kit." ZeitgeistFilms.com. Zeitgeist Films. n. d. Web. 12 Nov 2010.
  • Wilson, Jake. "Trash And Treasure: The Gleaners And I." Senses of Cinema 23 (2002): n. pag. Web. 12 Nov 2010.




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