For the remainder of 2017, Scott is on a one man mission to watch every movie on BBC’s list of the Top Films of the 21st Century. Click here to follow along with his journey.
Film: The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse)
Director: Agnès Varda
Release Year: 2000
Country of Origin: France
Seen Previously: No
Where You Can See It: Amazon Prime (Included)
The Gleaners and I is a 2000 documentary that features director Agnès Varda following around some homeless people that rummage through fields after harvest and pick through trash cans for discarded food. It’s filmed mostly with a handheld cam, generally looks rather flat, and has little to no actual structure to it. And yet, this film is one of the most entrancing documentaries I’ve ever had the privilege of seeing.
“Gleaning” is an ancient tradition that goes as far back as the Old Testament. It is the practice of the poor, destitute, and hungry picking over a field after the harvest for any left or dropped crops. In modern times this usually means things that were missed by the machinery, either through automated rejection or mechanical issues. Varda also expands that literal definition to include people that dumpster dive for food and other items. But the practice is dying. As laws change and harvesting machinery improves, less and less gleaning is happening, even as more and more people are requiring it to live.
It’s hard not to see a rather piercing commentary on capitalism on display. In one particularly effective scene, a potato harvesting plant is shown tossing out tons of perfectly good potatoes because they are either slightly too big, slightly too small, or misshapen. Dump trucks full of potatoes are loaded and driven out in the middle of nowhere and abandoned to rot. Some gleaners appear to pick over the remains, but the factory never announces this dumping publically, so most of the food sits and rots. This process is expanded upon in the cities of France as well, where food is thrown away because it is one or two days past expiration. Or worse, bread that just happened to go unsold that day. There are people in these cities that live off this incredible wasting of food, by doing what most of us would be disgusted with: digging through garbage. Varda smartly shows us all of this without making any kind of conclusive commentary. She lets the images and interviews talk for themselves.
This would be an interesting exploration on its own, but what elevates this documentary to something BBC worthy is Varda’s decision to include herself in the film. It quickly becomes apparent that Varda too is a gleaner. Not of leftover crops or trash, but rather of art, thoughts, and information. Varda’s curiosity permeates every moment of the film. She jumps from place to place in almost a stream of consciousness. After a particular interview with a gleaner who mentions wine grapes, we cut suddenly and find ourselves in Burgundy, France talking to some gleaners in the vineyards. Often, a particular thing will catch Varda’s eye and she’ll halt or pivot the film to discuss that. We stare at paintings of gleaners almost as often as we meet with the real people themselves. We observe her old wrinkled hands multiple times as she studies them with the camera and refers to them as messengers of her oncoming mortality. She films 18 wheeler trucks on the highway, fascinated by what they contain and where they’re going. In one particular scene, Varda forgets to shut her camera off as she wanders through fields. The director discovered this footage later and decided to include it in the documentary, calling it the “dance of the lens cap” which swings wildly back and forth across the frame as Varda hikes along.
This all sounds like it would make a jumbled mess of a film, and it certainly does. But it also somehow comes together. We’re all gleaners, the film says. Some people do it to survive, to eat. Some people take broken things and choose to make something useful and beautiful out of them. Some people, like Varda, observe the world and glean the beauty from all of it. Even the trash.
Scott’s Updated List
As we go through each film on the list, I’m going to re-rank them based on my own personal enjoyment.
One of the things I was most looking forward to with this list was tackling foreign films I have never seen, nor even heard of. I love jumping into the unknown of cinema and seeing what will come of it. We’re still very early in the list, but The Gleaners and I was exactly one of the surprises I was looking for. Though it can’t quite beat the powerful cinematography on display in Requiem, it’s absolutely deserving of a number two spot.
4) Carlos
3) Toni Erdmann
2) The Gleaners and I
1) Requiem for a Dream
