La vita è un raccolto

This film is a feast for anyone who loves film, photography or art in general. Agnes Varda takes the viewer along on a very personal exploration about what it means to be an artist. To glean means to gather whatever crops have been left in the field after a harvest and the film is on one level a straight documentary about gleaners in France, exploring the various reasons why they glean - survival, to feed the poor, for fun. But gleaning is revealed to be an apt metaphor for the process of making art, and so, perhaps on a deeper level, Varda is examining her role as a film maker, a "gleaner" of images and life moments. Regardless of why you might watch this film, I recommend it for the playfulness and beauty of the photography, and the complex and personal depth of Varda's narrative.

The Gleaners and I is odd in that it hardly feels like a proper film at all: it's shot on visibly cheap MiniDV, its editing is consistently unpolished, and it delights in crossing the line from personal to indulgent in excess. It's obvious that these are all deliberate choices; the question is, would we care if it didn't have the name Agnès Varda on it?

Ultimately, the film's amateurish style is somewhat deceptive: Varda demonstrates her talent for finding significance in the mundane, and strikes a number of compelling parallels in her examination of scavenger culture. The film does tend to coast on Varda's legendary new wave status at times, particularly as we linger on interviews and segments only tenuously related to the film's subject, but it's interesting as an example of a living legend embracing her medium's democratization: for all the good and bad it implies, she blends in seamlessly with the millions of talented people who own camcorders. -TK 10/21/10

You may remember director Agnès Varda from her 1986 film, VAGABOND. But over the last five decades, the `grandmother of French New Wave' has completed 29 other works, most showing her affection, bemusement, outrage, and wide-ranging curiosity for humanity.

Varda's most recent effort-the first filmed with a digital videocamera-focuses on gleaners, those who gather the spoils left after a harvest, as well as those who mine the trash. Some completely exist on the leavings; others turn them into art, exercise their ethics, or simply have fun. The director likens gleaning to her own profession-that of collecting images, stories, fragments of sound, light, and color.

In this hybrid of documentary and reflection, Varda raises a number of philosophical questions. Has the bottom line replaced our concern with others' well-being, even on the most essential level of food? What happens to those who opt out of our consumerist society? And even, What constitutes--or reconstitutes--art?

Along this road trip, she interviews plenty of French characters. We meet a man who has survived almost completely on trash for 15 years. Though he has a job and other trappings, for him it is `a matter of ethics.' Another, who holds a master's degree in biology, sells newspapers and lives in a homeless shelter, scavenges food from market, and spends his nights teaching African immigrants to read and write.

Varda is an old hippie, and her sympathies clearly lie with such characters who choose to live off the grid. She takes our frenetically consuming society to task and suggests that learning how to live more simply is vital to our survival.

At times we can almost visualize her clucking and wagging her finger-a tad heavy-handedly advancing her agenda. However, the sheer waste of 25 tons of food at a clip is legitimately something to cluck about. And it is her very willingness to make direct statements and NOT sit on the fence that Varda fans most enjoy, knowing that her indignation is deeply rooted in her love of humanity.

The director interjects her playful humor as well-though it's subtle, French humor that differs widely from that of, say, Tom Green. Take the judge in full robes who stands in a cabbage field citing the legality of gleaning chapter and verse.

Quirky and exuberant, Varda, 72, is at an age where she's more concerned with having fun with her craft than impressing anyone. With her handheld digital toy, she pans around her house and pauses to appreciate a patch of ceiling mold. When she later forgets to turn off her camera, she films `the dance of the lens cap.'

One of the picture's undercurrents is the cycle of life-growth, harvest, decay. She often films her wrinkled hands and speaks directly about her aging process, suggesting that her own mortality is much on her mind. The gleaners pluck the fruits before their decay, as Varda lives life to the fullest, defying the inevitability of death. Toward the movie's end, she salvages a Lucite clock with no hands. As she films her face passing behind it, she notes, `A clock with no hands is my kind of thing.'

If you'd be the first to grab a heart-shaped potato from the harvest, or make a pile of discarded dolls into a totem pole, THE GLEANERS is probably your kind of thing.

This is Varda going out again with just a camera. This time she finds vagrants and gatherers of all kinds around the streets of France, some who pick up after discarded harvests in the fields, others who find their objects of art or utility in what people abandon in the street corner.

There's a French history of "gleaning" that she references via paintings of women picking up wheat in the fields, that is of course her entry into images of life she gleans with her camera, herself a gatherer, but in another way it is to situate what we see as a certain rite of life with its continuity, something that people do.

So I like that we're called to see beyond desperation here, though at a glance many of these lives will seem dismal. Varda has taken an interest in itinerant lives for a long time as previous films by her suggest, Vagabond most notably, and she has the sensitivity of empathizing. We do see a few troubled individuals, because life kind of swung that way before they had a chance to hold on perhaps. But we also see a life that manages just fine for itself and roots itself in the other, something like the anti-ego philosophy of one of the people in the film.

None of them are vexed to live as they do, that we see anyway, and it manages to remind me of the ancient Taoist injunctions to forego the anxieties for "humanity" and "responsibility", often hypocritical, and make yourself like a clump of earth that goes on without minding. We manage to fret quite a bit after all as we do our own gathering of important things, though god knows to what real purpose.

This is a small film that will appear at times purposeless or addled, in that Varda doesn't aspire for more than what the ground will turn up for her, but she picks it all up with care and has fun with it. She doesn't just see a social issue here and we're better off for it. How much richer the landscape of film would be if more filmmakers would just go out with a cheap camcorder? It isn't the topical subject, any TV crew could film that, it's gracing us with a way of seeing.

Jean Francois Millet, the French painter of the Barbizon school, seems to have been the inspiration for Agnes Varda's interesting documentary "Les glaneurs et la glaneuse". In fact, Ms. Varda makes it a point to take us along to the French countryside where Millet got the inspiration for his masterpiece "Les Glaneurs". Like in his other paintings, Millet comments about the peasantry working the fields in most of his canvases. One can see the poverty in his subjects as they struggle to gather crops for their employers.

Ms. Varda takes a humanistic approach to another type of activity in which she bases her story. In fact, the people one sees in the film are perhaps the descendants of the gleaners of Millet's time, except they are bringing whatever is left behind once the machinery takes care of gathering the best of each crop, leaving the rest to rot in the fields.

Agnes Varda takes a trip through her native France to show us the inequality of a system that produces such excesses that a part of it has to be dumped because it doesn't meet standards. On the one hand, there is such abundance, and on the other, one sees how some of the poor people showcased in the documentary can't afford to buy the basics and must resort to take it on their own to get whatever has been left in order to survive.

With this documentary, Agnes Varda shows an uncanny understanding to the problems most of these people are facing.