In The Gleaners and I (Varda, 2000) potatoes, apples, grapes, oysters, art, leftover produce, unwanted objects, turn into treasure in the hands of their gleaners, scavengers and artists. Some do it for survival purposes, other for ethical convictions, and some, like Varda herself, for artistic expression. Powrie (2011: 79) writes that “Varda’s journey is as much a journey of self-discovery as one of discovering the hidden underbelly of France”. But she is not only a supporter of the marginalized, she is the queen of the gleaners, and with her digital camera scavenges for stories, portraits, art, and snapshots of her aging self.

Varda’s curiosity and empathy towards the marginalized, and her floating socio-political comments on consumerism and large-scale production, make the film extremely relevant to the current times. With a global ecological catastrophe and numerous environmental issues that humans have brought upon themselves and the planet, The Gleaners and I is more timely than ever. In addition to that, the use of the digital camera, the predecessor of today’s mobile phone, a humble but powerful storyteller, not only provides low-cost, easy and intimate filmmaking, but democratizes the access to communication and artistic media (Thornburg, 2017: 187). Varda herself is the predecessor of the millennials’ hipster culture, that nowadays uses zero waste and free sharing apps, redistributing and sharing online food, clothes, furniture and all kinds of commodities.

The self-reflexivity in the film serves many purposes; simply as an artistic choice, as Varda loves playing with different artistic approaches and provoking, as an act of solidarity and offer of equal stance with the rest of the film’s subjects, but also as an ideological expression. When Varda “shares” close-ups of her aging hand, her white hair, and her wrinkled face, the intimacy of her “selfie” images contradicts the showbiz, cinema, TV, and nowadays, social media idolization of “certain norms” (Conway, 2015: 78). These poetic semiotic images expand the definition of gleaning, and invite “us to look again at what we tend to reject and reconsider its value” (Conway, 2015: 78). Varda is not afraid to face the inevitable, and in that effort, her digital camera, artistic performance, nomadic art, rapping, jazzing, experimental images of a dancing lens-cap, a clock without hands, the condensation stain on her ceiling, and her sense of humour, become “anti-aging agents”, and ensure a different kind of longevity.

I consciously use social media vocabulary on purpose here, “shares”, “selfie”, and from the title above, the “#hashtag” and the typical YouTube video format of “How to …?”, as Varda seems to not be afraid to use modern media for her art. It is quite common that technology is looked down upon, especially by certain intellectual, elitist art circles, that often share an admiration for the past and the vintage, a retro-philia – many times not dependent on age – preventing them from exploring and understanding, not only new media, but the future of humanity. Varda is comfortable with her aging self, because she is comfortable with humanity. She accepts the real, as much as she accepts the fictional, and she embraces herself, as much as she embraces criticism. And this is part of the practice of reflexivity and self-reflexivity in the film, which reminds us the idea of Rouch’s “shared anthropology” (Rothman, 1997: 95). In the follow-up film two years later, Varda is not afraid to include the remarks of the marathon runner/market gleaner, who disapproves her strong and narcissistic presence in the film; yet his comment is invaluable for Varda, who relishes exposing any side of her “self”.

 As author” of the film she is an “artefact of the work”, and as MacDougall  (1998: 89) emphasizes the necessity of reflexivity in ethnographic films, she takes that practice one step further with her “selfies”, reminding us that every film is always a self-portrait of its creator. 

Filmography

Varda, Agnès, The Gleaners and I, 2000. Film. France

Varda, Agnès, The Gleaners and I: two years later, 2002. Film. France 

Bibliography

Conway, K. (2015) ‘Social Criticism and the Self-Portrait: The Gleaners and I’, in Agnes Varda. Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, pp. 71–89. 

MacDougall, D. (1998) ‘Visual Anthropology and the Ways of Knowing’, in Taylor, L. (ed.) Transcultural Cinema. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, pp. 61–92. 

Powrie, P. (2011) ‘Heterotopic Spaces and Nomadic Gazes in Varda: From “Cléo de 5 à 7” to “Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse”’, L’Esprit Créateur, 51(1), pp. 68–82. 

Rothman, W. (1997) ‘Chronicle of a Summer’, in Documentary Film Classics. New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, pp. 69–108. 

Thornburg, A. (2017) ‘Digital Storytelling as Autoethnography in Anthropological Pedagogy and Practice’, in Thornburg, A. et al. (eds) Deep Stories. 1st edn. De Gruyter (Practicing, Teaching, and Learning Anthropology with Digital Storytelling), pp. 179–190.