Someone pointed me to the Oprah website for a show she recently did on hoarders - people who meet an emotional need by buying and hoarding stuff of all kinds.
This reminded me of a movie I wanted to recommend here called The Gleaners and I, a by film maker Agnes Varda. I found it to be a very meditative work. I passed it onto my mother and it made its way through all of her friends. It's a good discussion group film too.
Here is a writeup on the Gleaners and I that was included in Issue 14 of Beyond magazine - Possible Worlds:
The Gleaners and I (2000)
Seventy-six-year-old Agnès Varda may be the “Grandmother of the French New Wave,” but she’s also a spry, intelligent, and entertaining filmmaker; her essay film, The Gleaners and I (2000) is one of the most inspiring documentaries of recent years.
The Gleaners and I is an essay film that provides a free-flowing and thoughtful look at the way society interacts with its leftovers. Shooting on digital video, Varda travels through southern France making incisive allusions to art history, homelessness, aging, consumerism, and the act of watching movies that could otherwise fill a whole series of lesser documentaries.
She begins with a definition of “gleaning” (while leafing through a dictionary with her affectionate cat looking on) as a tradition where the poor gathered the grain left over from the harvest. Then she visits the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and regards Millet’s famous 1857 painting of workers in a wheat field, “The Gleaners,” and films the onlookers in fast motion coming and going, gazing at the work throughout the day.
From there, she associates gleaning with a physical posture (“Gleaning might be extinct,” she narrates, “but stooping has not vanished from society”) and reflects on modern day gleaning—literally (a law in France still permits gleaning after the harvest from sunup to sundown) as well as figuratively (gleaning as a mental activity: learning, listening and watching).
“What strikes me,” she notes, “is that each gleans on his own. Whereas in paintings they were always in clusters.” By comparing various people (gypsies, artists, foragers), Varda constructs a flexible metaphor for engaging life and finding valuable things that others discard. She interviews gleaners, gains their confidence, and converses with them.
“There’s another woman gleaning in this film . . . that’s me,” she says as she humorously poses with a bundle of grain over her shoulder. Throughout the film, Varda gleans images: forgotten people, rejected traditions, unused produce, even stains on her ceiling (which she compares to modern art). The film is wonderfully self-reflexive, and she herself becomes one of its primary subjects: “It might be Old Age my friend, but my hair and my hands keep telling me the end is near.”
Varda has called her film a “wandering road documentary” that creates a cinematic resistance to the world of consumption. While other filmmakers might resort to grandstanding or ridiculing eccentric personalities, Varda s too busy celebrating life to bother. More than anything, The Gleaners and I expresses the joy of discovery, allowing the viewer to experience the company of a wise and compassionate filmmaker of boundless energy.
(Varda’s sequel, The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, is included on the DVD from Zeitgeist Video.)
- Doug Cummings