Digital Impressions: Writing Memory after Agnès Varda

I mean this is my project: to film with one hand my other hand. To enter into the horror of it. I find it extraordinary. I feel as if I am an animal; worse, I am an animal I don’t know.

—Agnès Varda, The Gleaners and I (2000)

We must be several in order to write, even to perceive.

—Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (1967)

At the forefront of audiovisual experimentation since the early 1960s, Agnès Varda embraced the digital camcorder in the late 1990s, producing the film essay Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I) in 2000 and, shortly afterward, the companion piece Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse . . . deux ans après (The Gleaners and I . . . Two Years Later, 2002). A superb example of cinematic writing, these works offer us the mise-en-scène of a marginal and yet diffuse practice—gleaning, which the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as the gathering of “grain or other produce left by reapers” as well as of “information or material bit by bit.” The reasons for gleaning are as diverse as its objects: gleaners glean for necessity, ethical stance, pleasure, picking unharvested wheat, odd-shaped fruit and vegetables, expired food, discarded appliances, and abandoned toys. A deft documentarist, Varda locates and engages in conversation with gleaners of all kinds as they wander the countryside, the seashore, and the city, but—“in times past,” her voice-over tells us, “only women gleaned,” while a montage sequence shows us female gleaners from paintings by Jules Breton and Jean-François Millet, black-and-white Larousse pictures, and a turn-of-the-century film clip. Gleaning, we will soon realize, is not only what she documents but also what she performs as she gathers images from the contemporary world and the history of painting, printmaking, and cinema, tracing constellations that at once display and repeat the humble gesture of the glaneuse. This is how she remembers—her own life, the lives of those whom she has loved and with whom she has worked, and the history of cinema, all being woven together in a memory that presents no clear-cut boundaries nor orderly lines of transmission.¹ Can we then look at digital gleaning as a practice and a theory of the margins—a mode of cultural preservation at odds with the archive as patriarchal ordering of space and time? A challenge to the very distinction between subject and object of recording, classification, and interpretation? If gleaning becomes the new heterodox figure for archiving in the digital age, what impression will Varda have left on the way in which we not only write film history but also think of cinematic writing, what Varda herself once called cinécriture?²

In Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1996), Jacques Derrida patiently disentangles the implications of the word “archive,” reiterating that the archive exercises a fundamentally “archic, in truth patriarchic, function.”³ However, it is his treatment of the word “impression” that warrants closer examination, as we proceed to explore how gleaning might redefine our notion of archiving and, indeed, of writing itself. In Archive Fever, which was initially delivered as a lecture at the Freud Museum in London, the impression is marked by a proper name and accompanied by a recurring visual representative: Gradiva, the haunting figure, the “mid-day ghost” of Wilhelm Jensen’s homonymous story and the subject of the Roman bas-relief that initially inspired the German writer. (Freud would analyze the story in a famous essay and display a plaster cast of the relief in his Viennese study and, later, at his London residence.⁴) The impression sustains three “condensed” or “overprinted” meanings, which Derrida himself lists: the first is scriptural or typographic, that of “an inscription . . . which leaves a mark at the surface or in the thickness of a substrate;” the second is quasi-conceptual, “archive” being a notion rather than a concept; and, finally, the third is genealogical, pertaining to the impression “left by” Freud through his formal and informal writings, his macro-and micro-interventions in the developing...