Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000) a documentary by Agnès Varda

Sandoval, Cecilia
Documentary History
Doc Nomads edition 9, semester 1
Nuno Sena
2506 words
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1. Introduction

2. Agnès Varda’s life and work

3. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse

4. Context

5. The performative mode

6. Aesthetics and Visual style

7. Conclusion

8. Bibliography
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1. Introduction
This essay presents an analysis of the film Les glaneurs et la glaneuse by Agnès
Varda, one of the most important authors in the field of contemporary documentary
cinema.
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse is a film that focuses on the activity of gleaning,
conceived in three different ways: as an activity corresponding to an ancient mode of
production, as an action of criticism and denunciation of a capitalist society of
exacerbated consumption, and as a model of film production.
Throughout this paper, I will discuss how these three descriptions of the act of
gleaning are presented in the film through what Bill Nichols defines as a performative
mode documentary.

2. Agnes Varda’s life and work

Born in 1928 in Brussels, she studied art history at the École du Louvre and then
worked as the official photographer for the Théâtre National Populaire, a famous
French theatre company. In 1954, she directed her first film, La Pointe Courte, which
tells the story of a couple and their relationship with the city. This film was one of the
stylistic forerunners of the French Nouvelle Vague film movement, as it was the first
step in a generational movement that sought to combine the reception of the world
as it is with the emergence of the author's subjectivity in order to understand it better.
Varda's prominence opened a door for more women to enter into film directing. She
said: "I suggested women to study film. I told them: 'Get out of your kitchens, out of
your homes, get the tools to make films." (Prieto 2017)

Varda directed short films, documentaries and fiction features. Her previous studies
in photography enabled her to capture the small details of the reality that surrounded
her. Within her extensive work one of the most characteristic features is the
combination of documentary texture with narrative development and the presence of
the author's subjectivity in the filmic universe.
She describes her style of expression as cinécriture (film-writing): “The cutting, the
movement, the points-of-view, the rhythm of filmmaking and editing have been felt
and considered in the way a writer chooses the depth of meaning and sentences, the
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type of words, number of adverbs, paragraphs, asides, chapters which advance the
story or break its flow.” (Smith 1998)

3. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse

Original title: Les glaneurs et la glaneuse

Year: 2000
Length: 82 min.
Country: France
Director: Agnès Varda
Script: Agnès Varda
Music: Joanna Bruzdowicz, Isabelle Olivier, Agnès Bredel, Richard Klugman
Cinematography: Stéphane Krausz, Didier Doussin, Pascal Sautelet, Didier
Rouget, Agnès Varda
Production company: Ciné Tamaris

In this film, Agnès travels through the fields and cities of France filming gleaners, rag
pickers and urban gatherers. The film narrates various aspects of the lives of those
who gather and make a living from gleaning. The sequences of the social situation
are interwoven with the director's intimacy and reflections to show that Varda, as a
filmmaker, is also a gleaner.

4. Context
I propose to look at the three contexts that frame the film. Firstly, the
cinematographic context. Secondly, the socio-historical context of the film in which a
critique of social inequality is raised. And finally, the context of the author's life.

Cinematographic context
In the history of documentary film, it was with the emergence of the avant-garde that
the notion of a point of view or a distinct voice was established, one that refused to
subordinate personal perspective to spectacle or fact. The way the filmmaker looked
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at the world began to carry more weight than the demonstration of the camera's
ability to "faithfully" record reality.

“A documentary not only documents events but conveys a distinct perspective on or

proposal about them. Its perspective or proposal will be one among many. We
accept the evidentiary value of images as proof of any one perspective’s validity with
some peril.” (Nichols 2010: 126)

Bill Nichols, American film theorist and critic, defines certain specific characteristics
by categorising documentary film into modes. For him, film modes help define the
form and meaning of a film. In 1991 he established four modes: observational,
participatory, reflexive and performative; and in 2001 he added expository and poetic
modes. This way of classifying films is not closed and a movie can have features of
different modes.

As I have already mentioned, Agnès Varda was one of the precursors of the
Nouvelle Vague movement and one of the few female directors in France in the
1950s. Her work was a decisive contribution to the feminist movement at that time.
Because of her double status as a woman and filmmaker, who did not belong to the
Cahiers du Cinema group, Agnès was perceived as an outsider and many of her
films were dismissed as minor productions or of limited critical interest.

From the late 1990s onwards, the documentary film incorporates auteur cinema
resources from the fiction genre, such as the reinvention of the first-person narrative
voice and the reconstruction of the subject who intervenes directly in the film, posing
the "I" as a communicative instance.

Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, is a type of film that starts from an explicit personal
perspective on reality, and the author and her performance are a primordial element
in the film. Taking into account the modes established by Bill Nichols, although this
film takes elements from different categories, we can frame it within the type of
performative documentary which I will describe below.

Socio-historical context of the film

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One of the most obvious consequences of the economic crisis affecting the capitalist
world since 2008 is the globalisation of poverty and social exclusion.

As Zigmun Baumann points out in his book Consuming Life, contemporary society is
characterised by its consumerist culture. The Polish author defines consumerism as
an attribute of a society made up of individuals whose capacity to desire has been
separated or "alienated" from themselves. In turn, this capacity becomes the main
force that sets the whole consumer society in motion. Consumerist culture differs
from the earlier productivist culture in the value placed on duration and transience.
Consumerist culture elevates novelty over durability and reduces the time between a
desire and its satisfaction. This urgency to satisfy different "needs" generates a
dependence on market novelties.
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse was filmed in France, in Beauce, Jura, Provence, the
Pyrenees and in the suburbs of Paris. The director said that the entire process of
making the film took place between September 1999 and April 2000.
With a video camera, Varda sets out to glean images of those living on the margins
of consumer society. Her gaze takes us into the socio-economic and political context
of the early 21st century in the French city and countryside, but this situation can be
extrapolated to many other parts of the world. The filmmaker shows the excess and
consumerism of our society by approaching characters such as gypsies, squatters in
the city, artists who work with recycled materials, people who feed off rubbish,
anti-system people, lawyers, etc. At certain moments in the film, there are isolated
shots of urban gleaners searching through rubbish and the remains of a market,
accompanied by protest rap music. A comparison is thus constructed between the
traditional gleaning in the countryside and the act of gleaning today in the cities,
putting on the same level those who pick potatoes in large plantations and those who
collect the remains in an urban market. The act of gleaning rescues the values of
saving and preservation, as opposed to the prevailing values of consumption and
waste of contemporary society. The characters of the owners of the fields,
supermarkets or restaurants are presented in the film as entities that act with a
perverse tone, because they do not allow those who have fewer resources to glean.
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The context of the author's life

In Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, the director is involved in the whole creative process
which, as I mentioned previously, she calls cinecriture. She is involved as narrator,
character, camera operator and director, which gives the whole work her style. The
film resembles a film diary, in which the author reflects on the external world as well
as her thoughts about her own image and the passage of time on her body. In an
almost humorous tone, she sometimes compares the rotting of vegetables or waste
with the ageing of her body, or comments on a close-up of her hand:

“Then there is my hand up close. This is what this project is about: filming one hand
with the other. To enter into the horror of it. I find it extraordinary. I feel like some kind
of animal. Even worse, an animal that I don’t know”

At another point in the film, the director is looking for Jules Breton's painting of a
solitary gleaner in the Musée d'Arras. The painting appears on the screen and next
to it she affirms her presence in the film as a character who inhabits the filmic
universe: "The other gleaner, the one in the title of the documentary, is me". From
there, we enter more and more into Agnès' personal universe until we reach her
thoughts about her own death.
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5. The performative mode

From the moment she asserts herself as the protagonist of the film, Varda presents
herself as a corporeal and visible character. The reflections on the passage of time,
old age and death are from then on focused on the filmmaker and the character of
herself. We enter her intimacy, her home, her memories, the damp walls of her
house. These images are the constancy of time passing and cinema then operates
on memory, both on a collective and an individual level. In one of the road
sequences (which function as articulations between spaces and also as reflective
parentheses where the viewer observes more an interior landscape than the
exterior), Varda comments on another definition of gleaning: “And gleaning, in the
dictionary, has a figurative meaning as well: to glean facts, actions and information.
And for forgetful me, what I have gleaned tells me where I have been”

In this film, the camera is not just a form of intervention or action on the world;
whether it is turned on or not, the camera is one's own way of being in the world.
Approaching the style of a film essay or diary, this film has a strong autobiographical
note, emphasising the personal and subjective qualities of experience and memory.
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According to Bill Nichols, the performative documentary presents the emotional

complexity of an experience from the filmmaker's perspective, emphasising the
subjective and affective dimensions of knowing the world. Such films do not focus on
a realistic representation of the historical world but allow themselves poetic liberties,
propose less conventional narrative structures and are open to more subjective
forms of representation; all this from the personal point of view of the filmmaker who
is part of that world and is situated in a certain perspective.
As the American theorist states: “Performative documentaries bring the emotional
intensities of embodied experience and knowledge to the fore rather than attempt to
do something tangible. If they set out to do something, it is to help us sense what a
certain situation or experience feels like. They want us to feel on a visceral level
more than understand on a conceptual level. Performative documentaries intensify
the rhetorical desire to be com- pelling and tie it less to a persuasive goal than an
affective one—to have us feel or experience the world in a particular way as vividly
as possible ” (Nichols 2010: 203)
As with the early poetic and expository mode documentaries, performative
documentary works incorporate expressive techniques that give texture and
emotional density to the story, such as the use of music, video effects, subjective
shots, representation of mental states, etc., as well as oratorical techniques that
appeal to emotion to discuss social issues. Unlike experimental cinema, the
performative mode brings us closer to the historical world through familiar characters
and places, through their testimonies or essayistic forms of language and dialogue.

6. Aesthetics and Visual style

“The question of speech raises the question of “voice,” but finding and having a voice
involves more than using the spoken word. When a documentary “speaks about”
some- thing, when “We speak about it to you,” for example, it speaks through its
composition of shots, its editing together of images, and its use of music, among
other things. Everything we see and hear represents not only the historical world but
also how the filmmaker wants to speak about that world.” (Nichols 2010: 67)

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, this film was made with an
unconventional film production model, on the margins of the big productions and
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distancing itself from the construction of grandiloquent images. The Spanish theorist
Ángel Quintana comments: "(...) her denunciation is also a denunciation of the
situation of cinema. At a time when the image has acquired unthinkable degrees of
grandiloquence, Agnès Varda plays with poor images, collects fragments of reality
on her own to construct a true moral lesson on the capacity of cinema to confront the
small details of life, to observe them closely". (Quintana 2003)

It is well known that technical choices have a direct impact on the form and content
of the film. The fact that Varda has opted for a digital camera gives this documentary
an intimate character, a personal diary, as if it allowed her to write down her thoughts
and the images she collected along her journey without much artifice. At a certain
point in the film, the director refers to the camera she operates and, in her
characteristic playful tone, plays with the possibilities of the artefact.
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7. Conclusion

The above analysis indicates that like most of the films that fall into the category of
performative documentary, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse does not deal with the
concept of gleaning (in its different senses) as an external theme but rather with the
director's personal relationship with this theme in different aspects of her life. In a
poetic way Varda shares her images and intimate reflections with us, inviting us on a
reflective journey into the issues of social inequality, the passage of time and
memory. In this sense we can affirm that the performative documentary is the most
subjective of all the modes, because the directors share in a more direct way their
emotions and thoughts in relation to the subject matter they refer to.

8. Bibliography

Bauman, Zygmunt (2007). “Vida de consumo”. Fondo de Cultura Económica,

México.
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Quintana, Ángel (2003). “La realidad digital o algunas propuestas sobre el camino
hacia el ensayo fílmico”. Quaderns del CAC, núm. 16.

Nichols, Bill (2010). “Introduction to documentary”. Bloomington: Indiana University.

Varda, Agnès (2017). “Me he pasado la vida buscando dinero, pero he conseguido
que mi cine sea libre”. ELMUNDO.

Smith, Allison (1998). “Agnès Varda”. Manchester. Manchester University Press.