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SFC 9 (2) pp. 161176 Intellect Ltd 2009 161
Studies in French Cinema Volume 9 Number 2 2009 Intellect
Ltd
Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfc.9.2.161/1
KeywordsVardagleaningaestheticspoliticsstructuresubjective
documentary
Digression and return: Aesthetics and politics in Agns Vardas
Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000)Ben Tyrer Kings College,
London
AbstractAgns Vardas Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000) was made
by a film-maker with a history of engagement with political issues
and a powerful aesthetic fascina-tion. Reading the film in both the
context of Vardas oeuvre and of its production during a period of
political reawakening in France, this article suggests that despite
its apparent disorder, Les Glaneurs is rigorously structured
according to a principle of digression and return. This dialectic
is mediated through the theme of gleaning, which serves as a bridge
between the films principal concerns: the requirements of survival
and of artistic expression. Vardas technique recalls her previous
films such as La Pointe Courte (1956) and Sans toit ni loi (1985)
and it is in fact the autobiographical dimension of Les Glaneurs
that constitutes its greatest digression from the project of social
documentary. Crucially, Vardas visual curiosity allows the film to
avoid didacticism or utopianism; it tacitly raises political
questions but offers few answers. Les Glaneurs operates within the
context of a new political cinema dissatisfied with the post-1968
narrative; however, it is not limited to a single discourse. Les
Glaneurs is a plurivocal and broadly humanitarian subjective
documentary and its over-riding principle is Varda herself.
Agns Vardas Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I
(2000) was pro-duced during a time of political reawakening in
France, by a film-maker who pre-empted the New Wave, lived through
the Second World War and the May 1968 uprisings, and has made
political films about Cuba, Iran, fascism, and womens rights. She
has been described as a socialist, a feminist, and an idealist. Les
Glaneurs et la glaneuse is a documentary inves-tigating poverty,
ecology, art and autobiography. It was shot on digital video, and
the public response to the film was so overwhelming that it
prompted a sequel, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse: deux ans aprs/The
Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (Varda, 2002). So, how is Les
Glaneurs to be understood?
The film comes towards the end of Vardas fourth decade of
film-making; her career has seen vast social and political change,
and the rise and fall of artistic and cinematic movements. Les
Glaneurs is imbued with Vardas his-tory as the mother or even
godmother of the New Wave, a Left Banker, a feminist, and a
socially aware film-maker (Orpen 2007: 12). She began her career in
the post-war environment of 1950s France, where state funding
supported documentaries and the recent traumas encouraged these
documentaries to bear witness to the situation of the nation
(Greene
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162 Ben Tyrer
1. Her work between the New Wave and Les Glaneurs saw avowedly
political films such as Salut les Cubains (Varda, 1963) and Black
Panthers (Varda, 1968), explicitly feminist works such as Rponse de
femmes (Varda, 1975), films concerned with art, representation and
(auto)biography; such as Jane B. par Agns V. (Varda, 1986) and
Jacquot de Nantes (Varda, 1990).
2007: 42). Les Glaneurs, with its depiction of Frances
destitute, is therefore firmly rooted in this tradition of social
document, a defining feature of the work of the so-called Left Bank
film-makers. The work of Varda, along with her fellow Left Bankers,
Alain Resnais and Chris Marker was, as Jill Forbes suggests,
inspired by a socialism of a broadly humanist kind (Forbes 1992:
13), with films such as Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog (Resnais,
1956) and Lettre de Sibrie/Letter from Siberia (Marker, 1958) being
paradigmatic examples. Although not a documentary, Vardas first
feature, La Pointe Courte (Varda, 1954), presents a neorealist
depiction of the plight of poor fishermen in Ste and, in a manner
similar to Les Glaneurs, weaves it with another concern: the story
of a marriage in crisis. This technique of blend-ing the personal
and the political pre-empts the dialectic of documentary and
fiction that was one of the aesthetic poles of the New Wave, and is
another prominent feature of Vardas work from Clo de 5 7/Cleo from
5 to 7 (Varda, 1961) to Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond (Varda, 1985)
(Marie 2003: 71). It is a dialectic that resonates in the complex
structure of Les Glaneurs, where the New Wave technique of
introducing personal, even autobio-graphical, themes into a film is
manifest in Vardas continual self-reflection. Her physical presence
in the film complicates the documentary, grounding it in Vardas
personal concerns both with herself and other people.1
In her Directors Notes, Varda explains that Les Glaneurs is
woven from various strands: from emotions I felt when confronted
with precarious-ness, suggesting the socialist-humanist concerns of
the Left Bank; from the possibilities offered by the new small
digital cameras, suggesting a return to the cinma vrit techniques
pioneered by Jean Rouch; from the desire to film what I can see of
myself my aging hands and my grey hair, suggest-ing the dialectic
of the personal and the political, and a concern with
auto-biography; I also wanted to express my love for painting,
suggesting very obvious aesthetic considerations. She continues, I
had to piece it together () without betraying the social issue that
I had set out to address (Varda 2000). With Les Glaneurs, Varda has
forged a complex film that interrelates each of her concerns
through ludic and imaginative connections that show her to be a
film-maker attentive to questions of structure.
Metaphors of craftwork are common in reviews of Les Glaneurs;
Zoe Druick describes it as a unique film that courageously weaves
astute social commentary together with reflections on art, history
and biography (Druick 2001: 33). What such descriptions show is
that while the film covers a wide variety of topics, there is an
overall coherence to it; despite its jumble of characters and
places, Vardas playfulness and meandering enquiries, Les Glaneurs
is rigorously put together. Varda describes the film-ing process as
an organic one, based on an interplay of text and picture; words
give rise to new ideas and call for new images. New information
comes up, new contacts. We then go back on the road again (Varda
2000). This approach recalls the production of Sans toit ni loi
almost twenty years before, which worked on improvisation and
inspiration, tra-versing the countryside and discovering new
people. She explains, I allow myself to be taken on an adventure by
the process of documentary research (Harkness 1986: 25); this
philosophy of adventure-film-making is the same logic that takes
Varda from Millet to the home of Jean Laplanche and describes all
the points of digression in between. Indeed, her project
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163Digression and return
for Sans toit ni loi began as an idea for a film about vagrants
who perish in winter and did not become the story of Mona until
Varda met a hitchhiker called Settina (Hayward 2000: 270). In this
respect, Les Glaneurs could be seen as another permutation of the
possibilities Varda explored there, this time producing a
documentary rather than fiction film.
Varda explains that when she films she tries to be instinctive,
but then when it comes to editing the footage she is strict and
trying to be structural (Meyer 2001). As a result, Les Glaneurs is
indeed very precisely ordered. There is an overall oscillation that
recalls the movement of La Pointe Courte (and its double-scheme
borrowed from William Faulkners The Wild Palms). Les Glaneurs
moves, for instance, from Millet to the potato fields, then to
Breton, and then to Varda herself, and then returns to the potato
fields; from art to gleaning for food, to art again, to the
film-maker, and back to gleaning; from gleaning for survival, to
gleaning for fun and back again; from the aesthetic to the social,
and back again. Varda explains, I permitted myself only digressions
indirectly related to the topic () But always coming back to the
gleaners (Varda 2000). An almost emblematic example of this comes
from a sequence in which she finds people reclaiming the copper
coils from old televisions to sell as scrap. The camera pans gently
across the junk and passes over a television whose broken screen
has formed an interesting pattern. The camera continues its
movement from right to left but then suddenly darts back to focus
on this interesting image, which has clearly caught Vardas eye. In
voiceover she says, I looked at the magic screen, and explains that
it reminds her of seeing the eclipse on television, and how in the
process of making her film she has seen the turn of a century. The
film snaps out of its aesthetic rev-erie and returns to the story
of these destitute or thrifty urban recyclers and their hammers.
This scheme of digression and return is, Varda explains, akin to a
jazz concert; at the end of [the] solo, the theme comes back in,
and they go back to the chorus (Varda 2000).
If the theme of the film is gleaning, then one of the most
prominent and recurrent solos is Vardas love of painting. This
duality is best exemplified by what she describes as the two
highpoints of making Les Glaneurs: meeting Alain F. in a Parisian
market and emancipating Hdouins Les Glaneuses fuy-ant lorage (1854)
from an art gallerys storage cellar. Varda saves these two episodes
until the very end of the film, again displaying the structure of
her editing logic, and suggesting what could be considered the
overarching nar-ratives of the film: a social or political concern
and an aesthetic fascination.
Vardas concerns, the struggles against oppression in any form
political, economic or social (Flitterman-Lewis 1996: 230), are
shared by the so-called New Realist cinema that Phil Powrie
describes (Powrie 1999: 10). She was a signatory of a Rseau
ducation sans frontires (2006) petition to safeguard the education
of les jeunes sans papiers (Anon 2006). She shares too a certain
scepticism concerning soixante-huitard activism, which is not to
say that she did not produce a number of activ-ist films in the
1970s; most notably the militant feminist Rponse de femmes: notre
corps, notre sexe/Women Reply (1975), and LUne chante, lautre
pas/One Sings, the Other Doesnt (Varda, 1976), but this political
awareness was a result of time spent with the Black Panthers in
California in the 1960s and her discovery of the Anglo-American
feminist movement,
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164 Ben Tyrer
rather than at the barricades in Paris (Smith 1998: 72, 10304).
Her scepticism is expressed in the figure of the goatherd in Sans
toit ni loi, who took to the hills as a result of May 1968, and
who, Ruth Hottell explains, she describes as a baba-cool; an
outdated hippy, a self-serving rebel with-out a clue (Hottell 1999:
686, 693). It is in the wake of the failure of the post-1968
Leftist grand narrative of resistance that the New Realism and Les
Glaneurs emerge, presenting instead a disparate, localised (even
indi-vidualised () pre-political refusal (OShaughnessy 2003: 192).
Although prominent soixante-huitards are still making films see,
for example, Goupils response to the struggles of illegal
immigrants, Une pure coinci-dence/Purely Coincidental (Goupil,
2002) such interventionist cinema has lost its potency. In its
stead, Les Glaneurs offers simply the language of humanitarianism
(OShaughnessy 2003: 190), an account of suffering, a depiction of
the plight of the excluded, and an investigation of their
survival.
It was the emotional impact that this suffering provoked which
prompted Varda to reach for her movie camera; she saw old women in
the market-place, struggling to bend down to reach discarded
vegetables or bread. Given their effort it was clear they had no
other choice than this to survive; she thought, Oh my God, these
poor people [and] this sentiment led me to make the film. I felt
bad for them (Anderson 2001: 24). So, with a similar impetus to
that which set her on her course to make Sans toit ni loi, which
she described as, my helplessness before people who die of cold,
vagabonds in the fields, tramps in the streets (Varda 1994: 40),
Varda set off along the roads of France to discover those who
gleaned.2 And in Les Glaneurs she found those vagabonds and tramps
still in the fields and streets; among the homeless and the
unemployed, the displaced and the disenfranchised, she found many
gleaners, such as Salomon, an African immigrant who gleaned enough
food from marketplace dumpsters to feed his friend Charly and their
neighbours for days; great treasures such as fresh fish and
poultry, and staples such as bread and fruit discarded once the
market closed. She also discovered Claude, a solitary figure in a
potato field, filling his bags from the mounds of potatoes rejected
because they were too small, too big or too ugly. They return to
his caravan and he explains how he lost first his job and then his
family to alcoholism; now he spends his welfare money on cheap wine
and gleans enough food to survive. Such suffering moved Varda
deeply; reflecting on those scenes she says, Sometimes [I was]
touched to tears. That one in the caravan was painful (Meyer
2001).
Astounded by the mountains of potatoes farmers dump in their
fields and affected by the suffering, Varda contacts Restos du
coeur, a charity food program, and representatives come to take
away sack after sack of pro-duce.3 This is a rare moment of
intervention on Vardas part, whose gen-eral scheme throughout the
film is simply to connect to the people that she meets at a human
level; recalling her project in Daguerrotypes (Varda, 19745) to get
to know the people of her street in Paris. And such human-itarian
action, OShaughnessy points out, is not a solution to the systems
harshness but rather a kind of compensation for its violence
(OShaughnessy 2003: 193). The law too, while ultimately in the
service of the status quo, can be seen as an embedded form of the
outcomes of earlier struggles and French law contains a number of
provisions which relate to the plight of the needy (OShaughnessy
2004: 231). For instance, the tat de ncessit
2. All translations have been made by the author unless
otherwise specified.
3. Restos du coeur, founded by the actor Coluche, itself
provides another interesting connection between the arts and
humanitarian politics.
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165Digression and return
(state of necessity) mitigates the theft of bread by the
starving, and Varda is at great pains to spell out the legal
provisions made for gleaners in the French Penal Code. She stands a
judge, fully robed, in a field of cabbages to quote Article R-26.10
and an edict dated 2 November 1554 that declare the rights of the
gleaner. She focuses too on a court case involving a group of young
people who vandalised a supermarket carpark because, they claimed,
the owners poured bleach on any waste food to deter gleaners; the
owners claim they used bleach only to clean up the mess, and the
judge has no choice but to prosecute them. Les Glaneurs bears
witness to the process of the system, a system that runs according
to Louis Renaults dictum, to live is to consume (Ross 1995: 15).
This logic creates a grand narrative of prosperity and well-being,
one which, through images of potato mountains and solitary
gleaners, Varda reveals to be predicated on exclusion and
deprivation, uncovering a subterranean world of poverty and
loneliness in the midst of plenty (Scott 2000: 31).
Against this process, Les Glaneurs puts forth a plurivocal
commentary of different forms of gleaning (Cooper 2006: 77), each
one an individual act of resistance to the hegemonic commercial
model. This is exemplified perfectly by the episode at Noirmoutier,
where Varda finds a host of gleaners picking oysters at low tide.
Ernest Callenbach describes it simply as a wackily charm-ing
discussion of exactly how far from the cultivated beds gleaners
must stay, but its implications are far more profound (Callenbach
2002: 47). Each gleaner is alone with their rake and their bucket,
and as a group they all agree there are a set of rules restricting
their access to the commercial shell-fish, but no two gleaners
agree precisely on what these restrictions are. There is a general
recognition of the system but each gleaner resists it in their own
way; some stray too close to the oyster beds, others glean too
much. Each gleaner follows their own particular logic and together
they show how what is deemed waste by the owners (oysters knocked
loose from their beds by the sea) can be reconsidered as useful.
This is reiterated by Vardas demo-cratic treatment of [her]
interview subjects (Wilson 2002). Just as each gleaner at
Noirmoutier is allowed to speak without any one being considered
right, each voice throughout Les Glaneurs is treated equally;
without pass-ing judgement on them, Varda allows them to speak for
themselves.
This reconsideration demonstrates the ethical dimension of
gleaning; the practice redeems waste, which qualifies as a modern
deadly sin and functions as a modest corrective to the
industrial-scale excess produced by the consumer society
(Callenbach 2002: 47). When tons of potatoes are left to rot in the
fields and vintage grapes wither and die in the vineyard, ethical
gleaners such as Franois of Aix are obliged to act. Franois has a a
job, a salary, and a social security number, but claims to have
eaten out of rubbish bins for the last ten years, and at no
detriment to his health. Indeed, he is full of energy as he strides
through the town, proclaiming the rights of birds and the stupidity
of people who throw things away. The New Statesman may refer to him
as a self-aggrandising eco-warrior (Romney 2001: 47), but he is
making a stand against an over-arching narrative of French
soci-ety, and the hegemony of the sell-by-date. Varda is clearly in
agreement with Franois ethics; in Deux ans aprs, they are shown
appearing together on the French television program Nulle part
ailleurs (Canal+, date unknown) declaring, This wastage is
scandalous, so gleaning makes sense.
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166 Ben Tyrer
Figure 1: A potato gleaner (courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).
Figure 2: Alain F. (courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).
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167Digression and return
Figure 3: An oyster gleaner in Noirmoutier (courtesy of
Zeitgeist Video).
Figure 4: A supermarket protester (courtesy of Zeitgeist
Video).
Figure 3: An oyster gleaner in Noirmoutier (courtesy of
Zeitgeist Video).
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168 Ben Tyrer
The other ethical figure in Les Glaneurs is of course Alain F.
While he gleans primarily for economic reasons, he devotes a great
deal of his time to social projects; he sports an anti-exclusion
newspaper jersey at the Paris marathon and devotes his evenings to
classes teaching the French language to African immigrants in his
neighbourhood. And while Varda devotes con-siderable time in both
Les Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs to his pedagogy, her project manages
to avoid didacticism. Les Glaneurs is not a motherly lecture urging
her children to eat up their porridge (Rosello 2001: 30). The film
certainly raises very important questions about the state of
contemporary France but Varda does not attempt to adapt the
individual lessons in resist-ance to a grander scale. She tacitly
raises the question of class by juxtapos-ing the gleaning of
destitute Claude with that of a thrifty gourmet chef, but she makes
no judgement on the different types of gleaning that she
encoun-ters. Elsewhere Varda has dealt with the question of
middle-class guilt: in the figure of the professor in Sans toit ni
loi. After sending Mona on her way, she has a guilty feeling that
she should, she could have done more, and despatches an assistant
to find her again (Quart 1986: 8). However, Varda exposes the truth
of such guilt when the assistant finally finds Mona; he is
disgusted by her and pretends not to have found her. Middle-class
guilt, it is clear, is good for hand-wringing only. Les Glaneurs
avoids overtones of such guilt through its exploration of the theme
of gleaning: Far from construct-ing just another bleeding hearts
cryfest, Varda takes Gleaners beyond the existential demands of
scavenging to make a case for it as fun (Jacobson 2001: 7). There
is a discernable turn in Les Glaneurs at around the thirty-minute
mark that is affected by this expansion of the concept of gleaning.
Varda asks her judge, what of people who do not glean out of
economic need. He replies that they should be considered in a
different kind of tat de ncessit, a need for fun, and that they
should be covered by the same laws as other gleaners. With this
revelation comes a shift in the focus of Les Glaneurs; Varda begins
to explore the urban practice of scavenging and encounters a number
of artists who work with found objects. This shift is also from
purely social to rather more aesthetic concerns as the discourse on
poverty becomes a discourse of recycling.
The act of gleaning now becomes a bridge between the
requirements of survival and creative expression. Those urban
scavengers who glean the streets for junk recuperate their found
objects into art objects, and in doing so reiterate the questions
of value or usefulness first raised in con-nection with food. Just
as the foie gras one day past its sell-by-date is redeemed by a
more enlightened soul, so too is the furniture that has gone out of
fashion or is broken by the artist-gleaner. Such action contributes
to the overall critique of wastefulness in Les Glaneurs, and an
artist such as Herv/VR99 adds his voice to the individual,
counter-hegemonic strate-gies of the film. He transforms maps of
the local dumping grounds, reading them as sites to collect
potential works of art rather than places to leave refuse. But in
the transformation into the aesthetic there is the risk of
alienation; in becoming art objects the origins of rubbish are
occluded. Waste is not in fact caused by a problem in the system of
production; rather it is as much an integral part as the product
itself. Such acts of recycling could be seen as merely a
corrective, tidying up behind manufacturing without getting to the
heart of the matter.
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169Digression and return
Varda is certainly sceptical about certain aspects of recycling,
which can be seen in her visit to an exhibition entitled, Poubelle,
ma belle (dustbin, my beauty). The garish colours of the artworks
contrast starkly with muted hues of the rest of the film, and as
the children make pretty things from the sanitised Coke bottles and
yogurt pots, she wonders how many of them have ever shaken hands
with their bin men. While again tacitly rais-ing the question of
class, the seemingly idle inquiry brings Les Glaneurs back to the
problem of alienation, of where this rubbish has come from. There
is a similar danger in Vardas project itself, with its iteration of
the similarities between film-making and gleaning. Varda cannot
compare her work to that of those who glean food to stay alive
without minimising their ordeal, and she is aware of the perilous
nature of this metaphor; you can-not push the analogy () its too
heavy (Meyer 2001). There is also a danger of idealising gleaners
by adopting an overly ethnographic approach. One of the key images
with which Les Glaneurs starts is Bretons La Glaneuse (1877), with
its depiction of the proud gleaner. This aestheticisation of the
gleaner occludes the reality of her social exclusion, and it is an
image which Varda is quick to undermine; she poses next to the
painting with her own wheat sheaf, which she drops with a grin and
picks up her camera. She also speaks of the modest gesture of the
gleaner (Anderson 2001: 25), a phrase which evokes perfectly her
approach to the subject, and repeats like a mantra, I never forget
the people who glean to survive.
However, apropos of Le Bonheur (Varda, 1964) and LUne chante,
lautre pas Varda has been accused, whether rightly or wrongly, of a
willingness
Figure 5: Poubelle, ma belle (courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).
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170 Ben Tyrer
to prettify (Forbes 1989: 124). And while this is not to suggest
that there is in Les Glaneurs an overt aestheticisation of poverty,
there is certainly a preoccupation with the aesthetically pleasing
or interesting. It is a preoc-cupation that Varda is happy to
acknowledge: It may be unfashionable to say, but I like beauty ()
though that may seem strange in a social docu-mentary (Darke 2001:
32). It is perhaps less strange in a social documentary made by a
film-maker with such a clear interest in art, and painting in
particular. The aesthetic moments in Les Glaneurs work as a
counterpoint to the images of suffering; they form the other side
of the films structural dialectic, constituting a discourse of
digressions. These digressions are the moments in which Varda
discovers beauty: in the lives (and looks) of the marginaux; in the
image of a drowned sheep that recalls her short film Ulysse (Varda,
1982); in the heart-shaped potatoes that she gleans, which are
never to be eaten, but rather allowed to grow old and wizened
before the camera; and, of course, in the various works of art that
she encounters. These artworks appear in Les Glaneurs in one of two
modes; firstly as an object, framed within the diegetic space
(Smith 1998: 32), such as the works by Millet and van der Weyden,
Herv, and the unknown artist in the junk shop. They are images that
arrest Vardas camera-eye, just as the heart-shaped potatoes and
broken television did. The second mode is the tableau vivant; her
pastiche of Breton evokes the many poses of Jane Birkin in Jane B.
par Agns V/Jane B. by Agnes V. (1986), and in doing so raises
important questions regarding the nature of self-portraiture.
Vardas self-portraiture, her visual self-exploration,
constitutes the greatest digression from the project of social
documentary. She jokingly told her composer, Joanna Brudowicz, to
write a theme for a film about Aging-Agns (Varda 2000), and
Mireille Rosello has suggested that Les Glaneurs could be
considered as a Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady (Rosello
2001). The interludes in which Varda films her own ageing body, her
wrinkled hands, her greying hair, show the film-maker consid-ering
her mortality, perhaps brought into sharper focus by the destitute
who glean purely for survival. The episodes are poignant and
unnerving in equal measure; Varda realizes that she must be close
to death because her body is changed so much she fears, as she says
in the voice-over, that she is an animal I do not know. Les
Glaneurs is, in this sense, a subjec-tive documentary (Cooper 2006:
77), a term applied by Varda first to LOpra Mouffe/Diary of a
Pregnant Woman (Varda, 1958) and then to Daguerrotypes; it is as
much about the film-maker herself as it is about gleaners. It is
not unusual in essay-films of this type for the film-maker to allot
to themselves the kind of onscreen face-time usually reserved for
box-office stars (Arthur 2003: 58), but Vardas presence in Les
Glaneurs is much more than just screen time; the entire film is
wholly imbued with her subjectivity. The direction and tone of the
film is dictated entirely by her fancy; the chance discovery of the
heart-shaped potatoes, which Varda seizes upon with an almost
childlike glee, diverts the narration and the documentary: the
gleaners story is suddenly interrupted by an autobiographical
sequence (Rosello 2001: 31).
Yvette Bir suggests that [w]hat makes Vardas films beautiful is
that the idea of death becomes a fertile, vital principle and while
Les Glaneurs is
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171Digression and return
Figure 6: Varda posing as Bretons gleaner (courtesy of Zeitgeist
Video).
Figure 7: The animal I do not know (courtesy of Zeitgeist
Video).
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172 Ben Tyrer
Figure 8: The heart-shaped potatoes (courtesy of Zeitgeist
Video).
Figure 9: The final shot of the painting flapping in the wind
(courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).
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173Digression and return
perhaps a more ponderously morbid approach to the subject (Bir
1997: 6), death is nonetheless a generative topic in the film.
However, a question remains; are these digressions in fact an
intrusion upon the film, like Vardas hand which literally breaks
into the frame from behind the camera on several occasions. Do
these autobiographical episodes get in the way of the social
document? There is at least one viewer who thinks so. When Varda
visits Alain F. in Deux ans aprs, she asks him what he thinks of
Les Glaneurs, what its weak points were. He replies that he is not
fond of her presence in the film; when she films her hands and her
hair, he explains, I think your self-portrait is () unnecessary.
Alain, politically aware and ethically committed, feels that the
digressive elements are an obstruction to the film. Implicitly he
is suggesting that he would have preferred a docu-mentary that
concerned itself solely with a discourse of gleaning as a political
act. There is, it seems, a desire among reviewers too that the film
be more political. A characterisation of the film as an enterprise
that aims not only to portray the world, but also through the
immediacy of the video image, to change it (Romney 2001: 48), is
symptomatic of a tendency to over-emphasize the rare instances of
intervention in Les Glaneurs. Sarah Cooper suggests that in the
past [c]ritics have questioned Vardas approach to her subjects,
seeing too much of a distorting power struggle that the film-maker
wins (Cooper 2006: 79); an observation that could be extended to
Les Glaneurs as well. But Varda clearly feels that she struck the
right balance between self-referential moments () and moments
focused on those whose reality and behaviour I found so striking
(Varda 2000). She also identifies another important dialectic in
the film: between herself and the audience. Her main aim is to
involve people and she suggests that her strategy of subjective
documentary means that I give enough of myself, so they have to
come to me (Meyer 2001).
It is clear then that Les Glaneurs cannot be reduced only to a
political discourse; however, several readings of the film suggest
that even the most aesthetic of Vardas concerns can be considered
in a more political context. Coopers reading of the film via
Levinasian philosophy suggests that Vardas self-portrait is
ultimately an ethical project. Les Glaneurs evokes the Levinasian
Other, to whom we are obligated in their frailty, and it is the
assertion of the primacy of the Other (reiterated in the film by
Laplanche) that makes it less a self-centred portrait than one ()
in which the self is decentred through its concern for others,
being rendered unknown and unknowable in the process (Cooper 2006:
89). Vardas interplay of self and other reveals the fundamental
interdependency of the two. This presentation of self is
anti-narcissistic because the camera refuses to recuperate old age
as a non-conformist form of beauty (Rosello 2001: 35). It is the
bodys imminent status as waste which sug-gests finally that not
everything can be reused but that crucially that which is
eliminated is as important, as interesting, as that which is not
(Hawkins 2002). Such concerns with the body, OShaughnessy suggests,
are a key vector of the wave of socially engaged films that have
been such a feature of recent French cinema (OShaughnessy 2004:
220). Vardas concern for her own body connects with the needs of
the glean-ers whose struggles for food and shelter are of course
bodily concerns. The gleaners bodies are sites of suffering and
resistance, detached from
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174 Ben Tyrer
society, existing only as fragments. Through this aesthetic of
the frag-ment, Ruth Cruickshank reads Les Glaneurs in terms of
Benjamins essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction. In the age of global consumption Varda exploits
digital technology to edit together her gleaned fragments in such a
way as to invite rather than interrupt contemplation, and the
fragment concerning Hdouins painting raises questions about the
consumption of art, and art as a mode of consump-tion as envisaged
by Benjamin (Cruickshank 2007: 121). The aesthetic becomes
political for Homay King as well. The heart-shaped potato Varda
suggests is the films symbol. Perhaps my emblem, indeed it is an
emblem of the fundamental duality of Les Glaneurs: the potential
food object become art object. For King it should be reconsidered
as a rhizome, a root with underground circuits and radial offshoots
(King 2007: 423). Not just a symbol for Vardas editing technique,
the rhizome is, apropos of Deleuze and Guattari, a design for
social struggle as well (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 328).
Les Glaneurs is not interventionist cinema of the kind produced
post-1968 because the grand narrative of such Leftist politics has
been broken. From this shattering has emerged a number of
fragmentary political films that present multiple, individual and
local resistances, and are situated between the elaborated politics
that was and the politics yet to come (OShaughnessy 2007: 179). Les
Glaneurs presents such a plurivocal con-figuration of the real that
is neither didactic nor utopian; it raises political questions
concerning humanitarian and ecological issues but offers few
answers. It is a wide-ranging documentary that does not limit
itself to one particular discourse. Les Glaneurs is foremost an
Agns Varda film, and should be understood as a part of her ongoing
auteurist project. It con-tains elements of each film that has gone
before it and addresses issues of structure and social awareness
that have concerned Varda since the begin-ning of her career.
ReferencesAnderson, M. (2001), The Modest Gesture of the
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Suggested citationTyrer, B. (2009), Digression and return:
Aesthetics and politics in Agns Vardas
Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), Studies in French Cinema 9:
2, pp. 161176, doi: 10.1386/sfc.9.2.161/1
Contributor detailsBen Tyrer is a doctoral student in Film
Studies at Kings College London. His research interests include
critical theory and film theory, art cinema, and Left Bank
film-makers. His thesis investigates a relation between the
historiography of film noir and Lacanian structures of
interpretation and meaning. His research is supported by the
AHRC.
Contact: Film Studies Department, Kings College London, Strand,
WC2R 2LS. E-mail: [email protected]
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