The Gleaners and I
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| The Gleaners and I ("Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse") |
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| Directed by | Agnès Varda |
| Written by | Agnès Varda |
| Starring | Bodan Litnanski, François Wertheimer, others |
| Release date(s) | 2000 (France) |
| Running time | 82 mins |
| Language | French, English |
| Budget | N/A |
| IMDb profile | |
The Gleaners and I is a French documentary by Agnès Varda that features the practice of Gleaning. It was released as Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse in France in 2000.
[edit] The Subjects
The film tracks a series of gleaners as they hunt for food, knicknacks, and personal connection. Varda travels French countryside and city to find and film not only field gleaners, but also urban gleaners and those connected to gleaners, including a wealthy restaurant owner whose ancestors were gleaners. The film spends time capturing the many aspects of gleaning and the many people who glean to survive. It touches on things such as the teacher named Alain who is an urban gleaner who has a master's degree. He teaches immigrants. Varda's other subjects include artists who incorporate recycled materials into their work, symbols she discovers during her filming (including a clock without hands and a heart-shaped potato), and the French law regarding gleaning.
[edit] Technique
The film is notable for its use of a hand-held camera and for its unusual camera angles and techniques. In one particular scene Varda, the filmmaker, forgets to turn off her camera. As the camera hangs to her side the filming proceeds, and the viewer can see the shifting ground and the dangling lens cap. Varda calls this shot "The Dance of the Lens Cap".
In The Gleaners and I, Varda films herself combing her newly discovered gray hair, and there are many visuals of her aging hands. She frequently "catches" trucks on the freeway, placing her hand in front of the camera in the ASL sign for "o", with the truck in the center of her hand, then closing in on them as she drives past them.
Much of this footage is woven into the film to show that Varda, as a film maker, is also a gleaner. This concept is made explicit in the French title, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, which could be translated as "the gleaners and the gleaneress".
