Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, New and Expanded Edition

29. The Gleaners and “Us”: The Radical Modesty of Agnès Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse

Chapter 29 The Gleaners and “Us” The Radical Modesty of Agnès Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse Virginia Bonner In both its formal and thematic choices, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) is one of Agnès Varda’s most experimental films to date. The documentary’s delicate themes of poverty, aging, filmmaking, and art warrant this shift toward a more unconventional style. Gleaners explores the agricultural tradition of gleaning, the legalized practice of culling leftover food from fields after the harvest. Varda journeys from France’s rural fields to its urban markets to meet and, with her handheld DV camera, to chronicle the lives of gleaners of all sorts. Through her direct address to the camera, her voice-over commentary, and her associative editing choices, she reveals that some glean out of necessity while others glean as a lifestyle choice or in rebellion against commercialism and consumer waste. These diverse people, their life conditions, and their reasons for gleaning seem unrelated at first, but over the course of the film, Varda draws remarkable social connections among them. Such unusual associations question and upend conventions concerning subjects worthy of documentation, since Varda chooses to include not traditional documentary fare but quite the opposite: moments of banality, images of aging and decay, and interviews with social outcasts. Gleaners encourages viewers to connect the motives one might expect for gleaning, such as poverty and adversity, to more unexpected ones, such as resourcefulness, tradition, art, and activism. The Gleaners and “Us” 495 Varda recognizes that her task as documentary filmmaker parallels that of other gleaners, though her voice-over says that instead of grains or fruit she gleans “acts, gestures, and information” with her camera. Moments selected from her travels and her many hours of footage self-reflexively acknowledge her own role as, in her words, a “gleaner of images”: la glaneuse. By extension, Varda’s methodology in Gleaners underscores that documentary filmmaking itself is always a form of gleaning, conditioned by what a filmmaker finds valuable while shooting on location, which footage the filmmaker selects for inclusion in a film, and how the filmmaker chooses to arrange those selections for an audience. Varda describes this approach to filmmaking as educational : “Every time you make a film, you learn something. You approach other people, other people’s work, some landscape you never noticed before. It’s like giving sudden life to what you see and capturing the beauty in it” (Anderson 27). What makes Gleaners unique is Varda’s profound manipulation of address in the process of achieving these effects. By modifying the modes of address, identification, and narration particular to the documentary genre, Varda hails both her viewers and the people she films—including herself— as active participants in Gleaners. This narrational style, which I call “filming in the second person,” creatively locates Varda within her arguments while maintaining a firm commitment to the people she talks to, gleaners and viewers alike. As a result Varda’s film conveys as much about herself and her spectators as her many acquaintances who glean. She draws poignant connections among these seemingly disparate groups, and the resulting eightytwo -minute film engenders a complex but direct circle of communication among filmmaker, filmed subjects, and viewing audience. In this essay I examine how Varda’s filming in the second person contemplates the social politics of gleaning while simultaneously using her innovative filmic “you” to scrutinize the structures of documentary representation itself. Indeed, the film is full of not only people revealing themselves but people revealing themselves to each other. With her onscreen presence, Varda connects with the gleaners she meets, and her physical proximity to them serves as a reminder that she shares in the conditions of their lives. Varda explains, “I asked people to reveal themselves, to give a lot of themselves; so I thought that the film should also reveal a little about the filmmakers, that I should just use a little bit of myself in it” (Havis). Underscoring this association is one of the film’s most self-reflexive moments, one wherein Varda playfully adopts the pose of Jules Breton’s La glaneuse for the camera, balancing a bundle of wheat proudly on her shoulder before dropping it in favor of her DV camera. Though seemingly whimsical , it is significant that she adopts the pose of the subject of the painting 496 V I R G...