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L'Esprit Crateur, Volume 47, Number 3, Fall 2007 , pp. 119-132 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/esp.2007.0055

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/esp/summary/v047/47.3cruickshank.html

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 The Work of Art in the Age of
Global Consumption:
Agns Vardas Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse
Ruth Cruickshank

I
N HER 2000 FILM Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, Agns Varda, the
glaneuse of her title, films people gleaning in urban and rural locations
across France. The opening sequence of the film features a close-up of
the page of the Larousse illustr that defines glaneuse. Here the camera
dwells on the illustrations, reproductions of two nineteenth-century paintings
representing women gathering ears of wheat left behind after harvest: Jean-
Franois Millets Les Glaneurs (1857) and Jules Bretons La Glaneuse
(1877). Vardas film goes on to show how what in the age of global con-
sumption might be considered to be an anachronistic practice endures in
diverse manifestations in France. Some subjects glean food from waste bins
and at the end of markets. Others perpetuate traditions that permit the gather-
ing of oysters scattered from beds after storms and spring tides, or pick fruit
left in certain vineyards and orchards after harvest. Artist-gleaners ranging
from a retired Russian stonemason to plastic artists transform discarded con-
sumer products into unique aesthetic projects. Two sequences, le glanage de
lan 2000 avec rap and the rap de rcup des meubles, feature clips of dif-
ferent modes of gleaning matched with rap soundtracks. And, between the
potato fields and cities of the north and the apple orchards and towns of the
south, Varda intermittently turns her digital camera on herself, filming her
wrinkled hand, curving it into the shape of a camera lens, or is filmed using
the hand to film. Thus she underpins her role as filmmaker-gleaner whilst con-
templating a natural process of wasting: her own as an ageing subject.
Paradoxically for a film whose premise is an activity practised by those
who are excluded or choose to exclude themselves from the simultaneously
wasteful, homogenizing and marginalizing discourses of global consumption,
Les Glaneurs was a commercial success. Presented at the fifty-third Interna-
tional Festival at Cannes in May 2000 and aired first on Canal+ in a Friday
night prime time slot that July, the film then played to packed salles and was
a hit worldwide.1 It went on to harvest an impressive clutch of awards and
generated an extraordinary response from viewers. They wrote to Varda in
unprecedented numbers, recounting and sending her the fruits of their glean-
ing or gifts of artworks representing gleaners. This contact prompted Varda to

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 LESPRIT CRATEUR

make Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse Deux ans aprs which was released on
DVD with Les Glaneurs in 2002.2 Seeking to give back, in Deux ans aprs
Varda intersperses eight sequences returning to some of the subjects of her
2000 film with others introducing respondents, further gleaners and aesthetic
projects using gleaned materials. This footage is also cut with Vardas reac-
tions to the impact of her film and to the ongoing process of her own ageing.3
The success of Les Glaneurs coincided with the articulation in France of
a convergence of concerns about the increasing impact of the systems of
global consumption.4 Les Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs have also been situ-
ated in the context of the development of French documentary, which since
the 1950s has been associated with an agenda of social activism.5 Vardas
films, however, evade any such characterization. She describes her filmmak-
ingboth documentary and featureas cincriture: En criture cest le
style. Au cinma, cest le cincriture.6 Instead of the conventional separation
of the roles of scriptwriter and director, this holistic style encompasses the
entire process of filmmaking: from script, location, casting, editing, sound-
track, lens and lighting to marketing material. If Varda uses writing as an anal-
ogy for her filmmaking, Les Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs also bring the plas-
tic arts, photography and film into the picture. Indeed, whether deliberately or
unwittingly, from the first frames of Les Glaneurs the reproductions of Millet
and Bretons representations of gleaning invite viewers to make connections
with Walter Benjamins 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechan-
ical Reproduction.7 Les Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs also intersect with
subsequent critical thought such as that of Baudrillard, Derrida, Lyotard, and
Deleuze and Guattari, influenced in different ways by the development of the
global market and by the Frankfurt School.8 Rather than discarding Ben-
jamins essay to focus on contemporary perspectives, and thus paralleling the
processes Les Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs bring into question, this article
explores how Vardas representations of artworks and the art of gleaning in
the age of global consumption intermittently intersect with questions raised
by Benjamin.
Benjamins essay analyses the impact of technical reproducibility on the
potential of successive forms of cultural production. He argues that mass
reproduction in high commodity culture has withered the aura of the art-
work: its presence and authenticity, the time and space in which the viewer
may contemplate and experience its unique affect. As increasingly ubiquitous
contact forces individuals into mass subject positions, Benjamin fears the loss
of critical capacity and of the potential for imagination and reflection. He
identifies the advent of photography and film as the latest stages in the with-

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 RUTH CRUICKSHANK

ering of aura. However, he also suggests that film has potential to democra-
tize access to the artwork since for the first time in world history, mechani-
cal reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence
on ritual (Benjamin 218). Moreover, written on the eve of the Second World
War, Benjamin considers the global ramifications of the subsuming of the art-
work into the realm of politics. To avert the aestheticization of politics by
Fascism, he argues that the newly democratized artwork should be harnessed
to Communist revolutionary ends.
The recurrent images of canonical artworks in Les Glaneurs and Deux ans
aprs sometimes evoke Benjamins nostalgia for the past. Yet in the age of
global consumption they and footage of a range of other forms of art and art-
fulness provide a means of exploring the enduring potential of products and
(representational) practices that might otherwise be discarded as obsolete.
Whilst Benjamin writes of the ramifications of the development of technolo-
gies of mass production, beginning with cave paintings, bronzes, woodcuts
and culminating in the lithograph, photography, and film, Varda disrupts this
apparently linear trajectory. Instead, she gleans fragments from different peri-
ods and genresfrom old and new, from literature, cinema, photography, jazz
and rap, and from street, classical, experimental, professional, and amateur
art. After opening Les Glaneurs with reproductions of nineteenth-century
paintings of gleaning, Varda films herself in the pose of Bretons gleaner,
standing alongside the original canvas in Arras. She also visits Millets Les
Glaneurs in the Muse dOrsay where, digital camera in hand, she records her
visit in sped-up photography. Later, driving past a brocante, Varda stops and
joyfully records a serendipitous trouvaille: a crude amalgam of both paintings.
Repeatedly, but not systematically, the filmmaker establishes the link between
gleaning and her own activity of gathering images.
Les Glaneurs concludes with Varda attending the re-hanging of Pierre-
Edmond Hdouins Les Glaneuses fuyant lorage (1852), recuperated from a
basement of the Muse de Villefranche sur Sane as a result of her film. On
the one hand, that Millets painting of apparently harmonious agrarian econ-
omy is in the Muse dOrsay (on loan from the Louvre), yet Hdouins less
idealized representation languished unseen in a provincial museum basement,
begs questions of the consumption of art, and of art as a mode of consump-
tion. On the other, the role of film in the re-instatement of the Hdouin canvas
for public contemplation suggests that the artwork in the age of global con-
sumption may still have enduring agency. This local success therefore brings
into question Benjamins negative prognosis: Today the cult value would
seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden (Benjamin 218). For, to

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use the mise en abyme of the gleaner as tableau vivant (Cooper 84), Varda
brings traces of the representational practice of the past back, if not to life, to
be productively integrated into the present.
Throughout Les Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs the relationship between
the enduring affect of the artwork and the potential of discarded consumer
products is brought to the fore. For example, in Les Glaneurs contemporary
plastic artist Louis Pons explains his conception of waste-based art as poten-
tial: Pour les gens cest un tas de saloperies, pour moi cest une merveille,
cest un tas de possibilits. Thus, if Baudrillard glumly states in La Socit
de consommation that consumer society produces waste because the market
depends on the inbuilt obsolescence of products,9 Varda and the gleaners of
her films suggest that obsolescence is not inevitable, and that what is auto-
matically discarded as waste may still have value. However, no value judge-
ments are made between nineteenth-century canvasses, the pastiche Varda
happens upon in the brocante, or the gleaning of professional artists. Like-
wise, Varda films old photographs and postcards, includes footage of gleaners
from a black and white Russian film Earth (Dovzhenko, 1930), and delights
in tienne-Jules Mareys chronographs, an important step along the road to
moving pictures. These (proto) celluloid images do not, as Benjamin warns,
herald alienation and the complete loss of critical capacity. Instead, they make
links to present cultural and representational practices that like Vardas film
resist being commodified, and may thus have revolutionary potential, though
not in the dialectical mode envisaged by Benjamin. Rather, intersecting with
Benjamins focus on the democratizing potential of film, Varda explores how
traces of what is perceived to have been become obsolete may offer perspec-
tives that counter the simultaneously homogenizing and marginalizing dis-
courses of global consumption.
Bringing such traces into play, Vardas cincriture resonates with the Der-
ridean notion of criture and the traces of past, present and future representa-
tions always already inscribed in all texts. Indeed, discussing how gleaning
became the heart of her film, Varda talks of intuitive connections and slippage
of meaning:

Gleaning itself is not knownis forgotten. The word is pass. So I was intrigued by these people
in the street picking food [sic]. And then I thought, whats happening to the fields of wheat? Noth-
ing is left in the fields of wheat. So I went to the potatoes, and I found these heart-shaped pota-
toes, and it made me feel good. Made me feel that I was on the right track.10

This track of chance encounters takes the filmmaker to gleaners including

Charly, an old Vietnamese man sharing his ramshackle home and scavenged

122 FALL 2007

 RUTH CRUICKSHANK

food with homeless African Salomon. And to Alain F., a former biologist who
has elected to live off the fruit and vegetables left after markets, systemati-
cally gleaning them according to their nutrient value, and spends his evenings
teaching French to immigrants in the basement of the hostel where he lives.
In its intermittent, contingent nature such footage of urban subjects gleaning
from necessity or for pleasure foregrounds the development in France of la
rcup, underground movements that exemplify local attempts to subvert the
totalizing discourses of global consumption. Varda records similar activities
occurring in the countryside, frequently involving the waste of the industrie
agroalimentaire. These chance encounters with gleaners intersect with Ben-
jamins analysis of the chiffonnierthe rag-pickersimultaneously product
of industrialization and extended metaphor for Baudelaires poetry and Ben-
jamins own role as critic.11 In Vardas cinematic gleaning that films the rural
and urban gleaners of post-industrial France, la rcup becomes a motif inter-
mittently linking past, present and future, which in its provisional, local nature
evades the recuperation of contestatory discourses by the global market.
Given this emphasis on the intermittent, the creative and the contingent, it
is not surprising that Varda rejects accounts that situate her film in the direct
lineage of a perceived social activism of French documentary: Filming, espe-
cially a documentary, is gleaning. Because you pick what you find []. But,
you cannot push the analogy further, because we dont just film the leftovers
(Varda indieWire). Yet in her cincriture very conscious artfulness converges
with chance. Having noted that grapes are left to rot on Burgundian vines due
to viticultural protectionism, Vardas glee can be imagined when she happens
upon the appositely named Domaine de la folie (now run by a descendant
of Marey). Nonetheless, Varda also acknowledges her very deliberate con-
struction of filmic narratives out of gleaned footage: You know, thank God I
try to be very clever in the editing room. But when I film, I try to be very
instinctive. [] But then, when I do the editing, Im strict, and trying to be
structural, you know (Varda indieWire). Of course, in her editing of Les
Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs Varda does not intend to construct a totalizing
narrative. Instead she juxtaposes and accumulates fragments that shed new
light on Benjamins baleful contrasting of the total reality represented by
the painter with that of the cameraman [which] consists of multiple frag-
ments which are assembled under a new law (Benjamin 227).
The insidious recuperation of gleaning by late capitalist culture is under-
pinned by deft juxtaposition of gleaned footage. Frances youngest ever
Michelin-starred chef douard Loubet garnishes exquisite dishes with herbs
from the countryside around his restaurant, literally performing how gleaning

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can be turned into the ultimate of consumer products. This sequence showing
gleaning as luxury creates a stark comparison with the previous one featuring
Claude M. sifting through piles of discarded supermarket food. Here, recall-
ing earlier footage of mountains of misshapen potatoes and Vardas voice-
over noting how discarded tubers swiftly become health hazards, the gleaner
is an expert in the dangerous art of assessing the life-giving or life-threaten-
ing potential of food dumped because past its sell by date. This food en marge
de scurit underpins how the system that produces such waste also produces
the precarious situation of the gleaner. Elsewhere, comic juxtaposition draws
attention to the contemporary flouting of legal and ethical precedent pertain-
ing to gleaning. In one incongruous sequence, legal provisions for gleaning
are articulated by a lawyer in full regalia in a cabbage field. A female lawyer,
similarly clad, stands next to city-centre dustbins to cite a 1554 edict permit-
ting the destitute to glean, then describes how laws still allow for the glean-
ing of tomatoes, cabbages, and cardoons. She also states that given that pleas-
ure is a necessity, gleaning for pleasure is legal. As is la rcup, for discarded
items have no lawful owner, so therefore cannot be stolen. In turn, the uneasy
laughter generated by these sequencesand with it the risk of co-implication
of both filmmaker and viewersis juxtaposed with evidence of how such
provisions are contravened by greed, misanthropy or protectionism. In the age
of global consumption, then, the law of the market economy recuperates cen-
turies-old measures to protect the disadvantaged.
Throughout Les Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs Varda draws attention to the
process of editing as a key component of her cincriture, adding an implicitly
critical perspective to the skills of Benjamins chiffonnier who assemble[s]
large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut compo-
nents.12 Simultaneously cincriture operates as a means of exploring the
potential of digital technology and that of la rcup. These films avoid the
commercial tropes of DV, instead maximising its potential to record both the
unexpected and that which mainstream cultural production excludes. Forget-
ting to turn the camera off after filming in a vineyard, Varda inadvertently films
the ground and the lens cap of her digital camera bobbing in and out of frame
as she walks away. Rather than editing these images out, she gleans them, and
names the sequence la danse du bouchon de lobjectif, setting it to an alto-
sax jazz soundtrack. Where many documentary makers would leave such acci-
dental footage on the cutting room floor, Varda draws attention to how what
would habitually be perceived as waste may be viewed as a supplement with
its own intrinsic value. Rather than literally treating it like dirt, Varda retains
and prompts a reassessment of that which is normally left out of shot.

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 RUTH CRUICKSHANK

Varda often appears in the diegetic space, filming with a digital camera,
and in the opening sequences of Les Glaneurs the filmmakers voice over
refers to the effets magnifiques, strobosopiques, narcissiques that digital
technology offers. Indeed, Varda draws viewers attention both to DV and to
more conventional filmmaking practices by including footage of her being
filmed, being filmed filming, filming herself filming, filming her gleaning
subjects, filming her own hand, and inadvertently filming. Where the mass
media in the age of global consumption depend upon immediacy, a fantasy
perpetuated either by eliding mediation or using it to create a reality effect,
Vardas mise-en-scne foregrounds her manipulation of the technology that
allows her to gather and edit images. With this self-reflexivity, the presence of
the Breton, Hdouin and Millet canvases, and visual references to old masters
from Rembrandt to Van Gogh, Varda updates the question asked by Benjamin:
How does the cameraman compare to the painter? (Benjamin 226). Making
a link between the medium and the message, Vardas artfully edited fragments
invite a critical meditation on the potentialproductive and exploitativeof
new technologies in the age of global consumption.
So too do commentaries on Vardas use of the latest forms of technologi-
cal reproducibility. In a recent article on American documentaries, Paul Arthur
suggests that digital technology has led viewers to expect a historically-
grounded, newly-democratized rhetorics of real-ness, tokens of immediacy
whose perfect technological emblem is the DV camera.13 However, Jake
Wilson argues that whilst it is now frequently used by documentary and other
low budget filmmakers, in 1999 the use of DV was possibly novel enough to
seem like a documentary in itself, a way of reducing the distance between
Varda and the people she films.14 Drawing attention to the haptic qualities of
some of Vardas images, Gay Hawkins suggests that when the filmmaker uses
her digicam to dwell on her ageing hand or a knobbly potato, it functions as
a probing instrument rather than the screen as a canvas, dwelling on surface
textures rather than offering a totalizing three-dimensional perspective.15
Cooper argues that Varda uses DV technology to draw attention to the process
of the recording of images in order to allow concentration on the subject
rather than on aesthetic effect (Cooper 88). Whilst Varda describes the special
effects which she could achieve with her digital camera, she does not use them
to distort or disguise her subjects, but rather to challenge power relations.
Thus Varda draws attention to the manipulation and the mediation of such
extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assis-
tants, etc. (Benjamin 226). Benjamin argues that because they must exclude
such accessories filmmakers necessarily impose the viewpoint of the lens on

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 LESPRIT CRATEUR

viewers. Conversely, and self-reflexively, Varda foregrounds the filmmakers

accessories and viewpoint both with her digital camera and with her hand.
Plays of proximity and distance, syncopation and disjunction, frame film-
making as an act of consumption, destabilizing the conventional power rela-
tions between filmmaker, subject and viewer. Les Glaneurs and Deux ans
aprs also counter Benjamins suggestion that speed of the filmic narrative
precludes critical contemplation:

The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself
to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a
scene than it is already changed []. The spectators process of association in view of these
images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. (Benjamin 231)

The editing of gleaned fragments, the repeated motifs of a knobbly heart-shaped

potato and the filmmakers ageing hand, and the return to gleaners in Deux ans
aprs invite rather than interrupt contemplation. This suggests that Varda seeks
to encourage viewers to consider what potential agency is demonstrated in the
artfulness and contingency of gleaning by individuals excluded (or who exclude
themselves) from the homogenizing systems of global consumption.
Vardas use of digital technology is therefore not testimony to the film-
makers or the viewers critical capacity having been subsumed by develop-
ments in the technological reproducibility of the artwork. Nor is it another
link in an ever more globalized market-driven chain. To be sure, the advent of
DVD distribution has affected the process of filmmaking, with screenplays
and cinematography increasingly catering to the experience of the spectator
across big screen and DVD formats, and films being conceived with a view to
segmentation into chapters, which leads Jean-Marie Frodon to perceive the
transformation of film from [le] statut de service (immatriel) en bien.16
However, Vardas exploitation of the DVD format harnesses the latest devel-
opment in what Benjamin identifies as the democratizing potential of film.
Wittily and generously, in the DVD version of Les Glaneurs Varda offers
Deux ans aprs as a Super bonus. Rather than a repackaged menu of waste
footage, her gift is a new hour-long film which gives back to some of those
who were featured in or responded to Les Glaneurs, mitigating the recupera-
tion of the critical potential of these films by the market. Instead of using con-
ventional marketing and distribution networks, Varda marks (and films) the
release of Les Glaneurs on DVD by setting up shop opposite her own pro-
duction house in the Rue Daguerre in Paris. Her shop window opens onto
piles of misshapen potatoes, bushels of wheat and earthenware pots painted
with scenes of gleaners. Amidst these symbols of gleaning are an Avid editing

126 FALL 2007

 RUTH CRUICKSHANK

suite and a digital projector. In a mise-en-scne that is distinctly artisanale,

Varda articulates the pleasure she derives from playing shop. At the same
time, she foregrounds the modes of mechanical reproduction that enable her
to operate as a filmmaker-gleaner.
The productive potential of the juxtaposition of fragments is also reflected
in footage of disconcerting yet mesmerising aesthetic projects such as a totem
pole made from broken dolls. Such images suggest that although consumer
products are discarded as waste they are not intrinsically obsolete, and so may
be recuperated to aesthetic or subversive ends. Given the constant, and enig-
matic use of mythology noted in Vardas uvre by Alison Smith,17 it is also
possible that Varda makes intentional intertextual links to Roland Barthes
Mythologies (1957).18 One way of interpreting the images of artworks made
from discarded consumer products is to view them as a means of exposing the
mythologizing sign systems of global consumption, revealing how they con-
ceal empty promises predicated on waste. Moving beyond this structuralist
mode of demystification, Vardas footage evokes Derridas extension of Lvi-
Strausss notion of bricolage to any discourse countering the Western false
premise of a text having a heritage or a stable coherence, instead being
bricoleur, always already part of a tissue of texts, made up of provisional, dif-
fering and deferring meanings.
What is more, this cinematic gleaning also suggests that wasteful systems
may be challenged. In a bleak field, whilst Claude M. gleans from tonnes of
potatoes dumped because they do not make the standardized supermarket
grade, Varda picks up an imperfectly heart-shaped potato. On a connotative
level, this gesture is no doubt intended as a symbol for gleaning, for caring for
the excluded and also, perhaps, for Vardas evident affection for the gleaners
she films. However, the potato also performs an anti-branding function. It
appears intermittently in the top right hand of the screen, at once recalling and
subverting the constant presence of a slick logo on a commercial TV channel.
On the DVD release, unlike the simulacrum of a brand, the potato operates as
a signifier, weaving textual links between the two films by flagging up the
sequences of gleaners in Les Glaneurs who also appear in Deux ans aprs.
Elsewhere this and other knobbly potatoes are featured in close-up: haptic
images, fascinating in their unique imperfections and slow process of change
and decomposition. They, like Vardas time-worn hand, point to the natural
process of ageing, contrasting with the artificial, uniform obsolescence built
into consumer products. Moreover, as the potato degenerates, it germinates,
providing hope of regeneration from what in the age of global consumption is
discarded as waste.

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If Varda does not discard her gleaner subjects like ephemeral consumer
objects, she also resists the temptation of making her second film redemptive,
for revisiting subjects does not entail providing the happy endings of so much
market-driven cultural production. The sparks of a love affair between Claude
M. and Ghislaine that flickered in Les Glaneurs have died out by Deux ans
aprs. Although Claude is drinking less and has left the uncertainties of cara-
van living for a place in a hostel, Ghislaine has yet to find more stable accom-
modation. Franois, lhomme aux bottes, has spent time in a psychiatric
ward, and has lost confidence in the ethic of living entirely off consumer
waste he spoke of so passionately in Les Glaneurs. Charly is dead, leaving a
disorientated Salomon to live in the back of a truck. Nonetheless, Varda con-
cludes the film by returning to Alain F.s activit sous-sol: his nocturnal
teaching that, like a germinating potato, offers the potential of new growth
underground. This conclusion suggests that by challenging value judgements
about waste, exclusion and the cultural products and practices of the past,
there is potentialalbeit fragile and intermittentfor forms of interpersonal
exchange beyond commercial transactions.
Varda does not discard the artworks of her own (cinematographic) past,
and in Les Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs, there are several intertextual links
to Vardas earlier films, feature and documentary. In 1981 she filmed the
reclamation of discarded furniture from the streets in Documenteur. Questions
of marginalization recall the 1985 feature Sans toit ni loi. Adopting aspects of
documentary aesthetics, this film traces the inexorable steps towards the death
of a homeless young woman Mona, whose body is discovered in a frozen
vineyard which resembles those of Les Glaneurs. Albeit unconsciously
according to Varda, close ups of her own ageing hand and their evocation of
the imminence and immanence of her own death recall similar cinematogra-
phy in Jacquot de Nantes (1990), her tribute to her late husband Jacques
Demy. Other elements of self-portraiture parallel her film-portrait of Jane
Birkin, Jane B. par Agns V. (1987). Les Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs also
make poignant intersections with Vardas 1958 short, LOpra-Mouffe
(Carnet de notes dune femme enceinte), made during her first pregnancy. The
film follows a heavily pregnant woman walking down the rue Mouffetard,
and Varda describes the films genesis as an antidote to commercial filmmak-
ing, as well as an expression of the ambiguity of the giving and living of life:

Je venais de raliser un film de commande, et pour me consoler, jai fait ce film. [] Cest une
vision beaucoup plus physique, plus violente, pas du tout sentimentale, qui a permis certains
pres de comprendre ce que pouvait ressentir leur compagne [] parfois, certains dentre nous
tournent mal . . . On ne sait jamais ce que va devenir la vie quon porte.19

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 RUTH CRUICKSHANK

Varda juxtaposes sequences of scenes of lovemaking and of the misery of the

socially excluded with the pregnant womans progress. These are interspersed
with close ups of market stalls piled with skinned rabbits, offal, fruit and
vegetables. A pumpkin is split open, and a bowl containing a chick smashed,
so the potential of new lives and wasted lives is juxtaposed. These fragments
are linked to a location that might be expected to operate as an unequivocal
symbol of fertility, but which instead metonymically creates a problematic
image of the material and libidinal economies of post-war France.
Psychoanalytical interpretations are also invited by Les Glaneurs and
Deux ans aprs, supplementing Benjamins suggestion that the camera intro-
duces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious
impulses (Benjamin 230). Varda reveals that Jean Laplanche whom she first
encountered in Les Glaneurs in his capacity as a winegrower is also a psy-
choanalyst of some renown. In the second film, Laplanche discusses with
Varda how since his participation in Les Glaneurs he has begun to think of the
therapeutic process as a mode of gleaning. Thus generating new perspectives
on self/Other relationships, Vardas intention is also perhaps to reveal the
local potential for forms of exchangematerial and interpersonalthat may
exceed or evade the late capitalist economy of desire. Filming also appears to
be a therapeutic process for Varda, as she interweaves her own experience of
ageing and of gleaning, and hers is the only voice in voix off. Yet her voice-
over marks the difference between her ageing and her pleasure in gleaning
from the pain of an old woman painfully picking through broken eggs: je
noublie pas, pas du tout, quaprs les marchs il y en a qui font leur march
dans les dchets. Thus for Cooper, Vardas documentary ethic involves a
privileging of others over the self (Cooper 89).
However, as her liver-spotted hand mimics the lens of her camera captur-
ing passing lorries on the motorway, Varda foregrounds images that link her
aesthetic gleaning and the question of waste with her own self-portraiture and
preoccupation with the passing of her life. She describes her film as a petit
documentaire dart et essai, and sometimes revels in the aesthetic qualities of
what, for some gleaners, amounts to a matter of survival: Et moi je vais
promener ma petite camra dans les choux en couleurs et autres vgtaux qui
me plaisent. Indeed it could also be argued that Les Glaneurs and Deux ans
aprs are undercut by an aestheticized focus on gleaning as art, or that they
provide filmmaker and viewers alike a refuge from the suffering of the
excluded, and thus recuperate it, rendering cultural producer and consumer
complicit with the marginalizing mechanisms of global consumption. Or
indeed that the eye of the filmmaker who frames the mould on her ceiling as

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an artworka tableau vivant rather than a nature mortebetrays the luxury

of the comfortable cultural producer/consumer, or a twenty-first century
incarnation of the nineteenth-century ideal of poetic alchemy. What is more,
neither Les Glaneurs nor Deux ans aprs overtly addresses the impact of
global consumption beyond their ostensibly Francocentric focus.
However, on her website Varda presents these films as a form of resist-
ance: Chacun doit savoir quil est responsable de son voisin. Je crois beau-
coup en lengagement personnel. Par mon travail de cinaste, je mengage
personnellement. Je suis une rsistante!20 These claims recall Sartrean
engagement, begging the question of the situation and responsibility of the
cultural producer in the age of global consumption. In the wake of the Second
World War, Sartres commitment was a matter of action in the present, and
one that rejected poetic discourse as an obstacle to communicating the impli-
cations of freedom and choice.21 In the age of global consumption, Vardas
films have a haunting poetry, and they link traces of the past with the present
and, implicitly, the future. Nonetheless, if in Les Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs
gleaning is envisaged as a mode of resistance, it is not an unproblematized
return to agency. Varda does not idealistically assume that by filming them she
can recuperate her subjects from marginalization. Indeed, to claim that these
films make the revolutionary demands in the politics of art called for by
Benjamin (212) would be to impute a symmetry and an agency that would
betray the intermittent, fragmentary aesthetic and ethics of Les Glaneurs and
Deux ans aprs.
Vardas conception of the agency of her films neither is dialectical nor
does it match the homogenizing and marginalizing discourses of the market
with a counter grand narrative that would invite recuperation by the system it
seeks to resist:

Je peux vous dire que ce film [Les Glaneurs] a circul un peu partout en France et dans le monde
entier. Il pose partout le mme problme. Ce nest pas celui de lconomie durable, du commerce
quitable, cest celui dune socit organise autour du fric, du plus gagn, une surproduction,
une surconsommation, sur-dchets donc gchis. Les combats sont tous les niveaux. On peut
essayer de freiner lesquintage systmatique des ressources naturelles. On peut faire un docu-
ment sur les archis-pauvres dAfrique du Sud, dInde ou dAmrique du Sud. Ce qui ma
intresse cest dire: Voil, je vis en France, cest un pays civilis, cultur, riche et il y a des
gens qui vivent de nos poubelles! Cela a secou plus dun Franais.22

Locally, and through implicit yet performative contrast with the homogenizing
and marginalizing systems of global consumption, Varda uses her footage of
French gleaners to revalorize difference, and potentially to make a difference.

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 RUTH CRUICKSHANK

The measurable effect of Les Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs is that view-
ers may contemplate (on the big screen or DVD) Hdouins re-instated Les
Glaneuses fuyant lorage alongside footage of all manner of gleaning prac-
tices and artworks, from the auratic to the mass (re)produced. As Benjamin
analyses the potential of artand film in particularin the age of mechani-
cal reproduction, he warns of the global consequences of the withering of aura
in the gathering storm clouds of the Second World War. In the age of global
consumption, Varda harnesses the latest technologies of reproducibility to
present a diverse range of local, individual challenges to the chill winds of
homogenization and marginalization. Les Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs
counter Benjamins perception of film as the liquidation of the traditional
value of the cultural heritage (Benjamin 215). Instead, Varda invites the con-
templation of fragments of artfulness: past and present, needs driven, as a
matter of principle or for pleasure. Thus, through the integration of traces of
the past in the present and the editing and juxtaposition of fragmentary
insights into the individual ethics and aesthetics of gleaners, viewers are
invited to glean potentially critical perspectives from those who, in the age of
global consumption, are routinely disregarded or discarded:

Puisquon est dans une socit de gchis, il y a des gens qui vivent de ce quils trouvent dans les
poubelles. Parmi ceux-l, jai rencontr des gens formidables, qui ont une vision de la socit. Ils
ne sont pas misrabilistes, mais simplement misreux. Ils ont compris que devant un tel
gaspillage, il faut en profiter en quelque sorte, tout en denonant ce que cela veut dire.23

Royal Holloway, University of London

Notes

1. See Elizabeth Lequeret, Le Bel t de la glaneuse, Cahiers du cinma, 550 (2000), 32.
2. Available on DVD: Agns Varda, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse et Les Glaneurs et la
glaneuse Deux ans aprs (Cin-Tamaris, 2000, 2002).
3. For Vardas commentary on Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse and Deux ans aprs and stills from
these and her other films, see http://www.chez.com/demy/Varda.htm.
4. See, for example, Jos Bov and Franois Dufour, Le Monde nest pas une marchandise:
des paysans contre la malbouffe (Paris: La Dcouverte & Syros, 2000), and Franois-Xavier
Verschave, La Franafrique: le plus long scandale de la Rpublique (Paris: Stock, 1999).
5. See Sarah Cooper, Selfless Cinema?: Ethics and French Documentary (Oxford: Legenda,
2005).
6. For Vardas full description, see Agns Varda, Varda par Agns (Paris: Cahiers du cinma,
1994), 14.
7. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Illuminations,
Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 211-
35.
8. For an analysis of Les Glaneurs from a Levinasian perspective, see Cooper, 84-90.
9. Jean Baudrillard, La Socit de consommation (Paris: Denol, 1970), 48-56.

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 LESPRIT CRATEUR

10. Agns Varda, INTERVIEW: Gleaning the Passion of Agns Varda, Andrea Meyer,
indieWire, http://www.indiewire.com/people/int_Varda_Agnes_010308.html (accessed
24/01/07).
11. See Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
Harry Zohn, trans. (London: Verso, 1983).
12. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, trans.
(Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap, 1999), 461.
13. Paul Arthur, Extreme Makeover: The Changing Face of Documentary, in Cineaste, 30
(2005), http://www.cineaste.com/parthur.html (accessed 24/01/07).
14. Jake Wilson, Trash and Treasure: The Gleaners and I, Senses of Cinema (2002),
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/23/gleaners.html (accessed 24/01/07).
15. Gay Hawkins, Documentary Affect: Filming Rubbish, Australian Humanities Review, 26
(2002), http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-September-2002/hawkins.html
(accessed 24/01/07).
16. Jean-Marie Frodon, Agns Varda, petite marchande dimages, Le Monde (29 November
2002).
17. Alison Smith, Agns Varda (Manchester: Manchester U P, 1998), 45.
18. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957).
19. Agns Varda et ses documentaires, Paris Cinma, http://www.pariscinema.org/fr/2004/
endirect/varda.html (accessed 24/01/07).
20. Varda, Deux ans aprs: fiche technique, http://www.chez.com/demy/Varda.htm (accessed
24/01/07), quoting from Stphane Gravier, Visions sociales: rencontre avec Agns Varda,
ralisatrice, http://www.asmeg.org/index.php?template=article&ref=4&are-ref=2452
(accessed 08/07/07).
21. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations II (Paris: Gallimard, 1948).
22. Varda, Deux ans aprs: fiche technique.
23. Varda, Deux ans aprs: fiche technique.

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