Product Description

Agnès Varda, Grande Dame of the French New Wave, has made 2001's most acclaimed non-fiction film-a self-described "wandering-road documentary." Beginning with the famous Jean-François Millet painting of women gathering wheat left over from a harvest, she focuses her ever-seeking eye on gleaners: those who scour already-reaped fields for the odd potato or turnip. Her investigation leads us from forgotten corners of the French countryside to off-hours at the green markets of Paris, following those who insist on finding a use for that which society has cast off, whether out of necessity or activism. Varda's own ruminations on her life as a filmmaker (a gleaner of sorts) give her a connection to her subjects that creates a touching human portrait that the L.A. Weekly deemed "a protest film that's part social critique, part travelogue, but always an unsentimental celebration of human resilience." This Edition features the 60-minute follow-up film GLEANERS: TWO YEARS LATER.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27047 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-07-23
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, Dubbed, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Dubbed in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 142 minutes

From The New Yorker
The French filmmaker Agnès Varda, digital camera in hand, roams around her native country recording the movements of gleaners. Traditionally, as in the archetypal Millet painting, gleaners were women who gathered the remains of the harvest; their modern counterparts are mostly scavengers, searching in dumpsters and other likely places. The French, of course, give the practice a wonderfully perverse twist-many gleaners do so by choice, disdainful of wastefulness and rampant consumerism. Varda's photographic eye is much in evidence, and her narration is both shrewd and whimsical. When she leaves a camera on accidentally, she uses the unintended footage to create a "dance of the lens cap," a filmic gleaning that acts as a perfect grace note. In French. -Michael Agger
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

An Engaging Documentary
This is a wonderful documentary that reminds us of how much we produce and waste in the world and how the disenfranchised (and artistic) make use of that waste to survive. The scenes of tons of dumped potatoes and discarded food at the open air markets are remarkable as well as the gleaning laws France has on its books...its this whole underworld of gleaning I found so compelling. The characters Varda encounters are equally compelling and interestingly are not portrayed as whiny or blameful of others for their situations: they simply state how they live and we are left impressed with their ingenuity.

At times the film moves slowly as Varda includes some personal shots related to her aging and trucks passing by on the highway, but these moments of introspection are quiet pauses and do not detract from the whole of the film. The DVD has a bonus hour- long "Two Years Later" film that revisits some of the people we first met and is equally enjoyable. All in all, this is a documentary that is eye-opening and respectful of its subject.

Perhaps my favorite film on the nature of film
The explicit subject matter of this film is "gleaning": the long-standing but currently threatened practice of taking up and making one's own what others leave behind. On that subject alone Agnes Varda has created a remarkable documentary, that covers the history of gleaning, its legal aspects, the wide variety of gleaning practices, and most importantly the people who glean for a number of reasons, not all of which have to do with poverty or destitution.

What interests me most about the documentary, however, is the way in which Varda connects her own practice as a filmmaker to the practice of gleaning. After all filmmaking and especially documentary filmmaking depend upon and take up the remains of reality, that aspect of reality that can be taken for free, and the taking of which does not diminish the possession of its owners. In that sense, filmmaking is essentially gleaning, and in arguing for the rights of gleaners, Varda is also providing a defense of her own practices. What is nice about her involvement in the film is that while she is always present, and while she includes herself among the gleaners presented in the film, she does not in any way push herself upon the viewer. As much as I love the films of recent auteur documentarians such as Moore and Spurlock, there is something very refreshing about the way in which Varda makes her presence felt in this film.

What is perhaps even more remarkable about the film than this provocative analogy is the way in which her film subtly raises questions about the nature of film and responds to a long-standing debate on this topic. There are two major strands of thinking about what is distinctive of film. One is the tradition of thinking (e.g. Bazin) that takes its example from the work of the Lumiere brothers: that film is about taking up reality as it presents itself and preserving it for the viewer, revealing it in a way that is potentially more complete, more detailed and more compelling than its ephemeral presence in time. The other tradition takes its example from George Melies, and suggests that film is illusion, that what is distinctive to film is the capacity to take realities and reorganize them into something new, that is at a remove from reality. In this film, what Varda does is suggest a provocative combination of these approaches. The example from her film that illustrates this is her account of the "junk artist" (I can't remember his name) who takes up trash (what nobody wants) in order to make something of it that compels attention, a work of art. This film is able to accomplish just such a creation.

My favorite "scene" in the film is her discovery, by chance, in a thrift store, of a painting that combines several of the images of gleaning that she had been discussing in her historical overview. She says, roughly, in a voice-over: "this really happened, I didn't make it up." There's something very telling about this scene: that even in a documentary, one must call attention to the reality of the events depicted, for we all know that events can be fabricated. It is such a nice and simple reminder that "realism" is itself a style, and from her early film "Cleo from 5 to 7" to this film Agnes Varda continues to prove herself a subtle master stylist.

Absorbing, original and genuine
Quite simply, this was easily my favorite film released in 2001. The filmmaker Varda takes an immensely thoughtful look at contemporary gleaning practices and compares them to the gleaners of the past, particularly those potato field pickers seen in the famed Millet painting. Of great note is her use of digital video and how she considers this medium as a form of gleaning as well in that one can easily pick and choose among the remains ones collects in the camera. Lurking near the surface always are the concepts of age and decay, made all the more heartfelt by the aging filmmaker who pauses often to consider her advancing years.