Os Catadores e Eu

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.

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

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.

There are a number of reasons why I enjoyed this movie.

1.) I am into etymology. Most english words come through French through Latin and it was fun to attempt to match spoken word and subtitle.

2.) French rap. I am very much interested in the hip hop subculture and was amazed how similar theirs is to ours.

3.) Scenic shots. There were: orchards, fields, barren highways, a gypsie camp, a great many paintings, "junk" yards, and such.

4.) The camera shots. The journal/documentary filming allowed for several film taboos to be artfully waived. For example, the directors hands often purposefully find themselves in a shot, these were my favorite parts because of the witticisms she gave at these times. Also, an accidental shot were the camera lense gets in the way was made into another piece of ordinary object art.

5.) Also, I was intrigued by the comparison between classical gleaning, modern gleaning, and modern scavenging. See Dark Days for another good real life scavenger flick.

6.) Lastly, I felt a connection with many of the characters. People who were on the fringe of society and enjoyed it. Specifically, there were a few who had jobs and apartments, but still chose to rumage through old trash for their meals. "I've been living off trash for 10 years and I haven't been sick once," as on of them candidly stated.

Note - For me, these 6 items more than made this movie an enjoyable experience, but this is basically all there is, so be warned: There is no plot! Really it is just a bunch of stuff that happens, but feel that this helps the movie more than hurts.