Les glaneurs et la glaneuse
France,
2000, 82 min
Shown in 2001
CREDITS
- dir
-
Agnès Varda
- prod
-
Agnès Varda
- scr
-
Agnès Varda
- cam
-
Stéphane Krausz, Didier Rouget, Didier Doussin, Pascal Sautelet, Agnès Varda
- editor
-
Agnès Varda, Laurent Pineau
- mus
-
Joanna Bruzdowicz
- source
-
US - Zeitgeist Films Ltd., 247 Centre Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10013. FAX: 212-274-1644. EMAIL: mail@zeitgeistfilm.com. WORLD - Ciné Tamaris, 86 rue Daguerre, 75014 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-43-21-75-00
OTHER
Now in her 70s, Agnès Varda is still exploring the medium in this fresh documentary about gleaners, or scavengers, who find and make use of what the rest of us have thrown away. Inspired by Millet’s famous painting, "The Gleaners," Varda takes her minicam into the French countryside in search of modern-day equivalents of the peasant women depicted in the painting who scoured the fields after harvest, picking up what the harvesters failed to gather. Varda’s search takes her to some obvious destinations—potato fields in Beauce, vineyards in Provence—but also on some accidental detours that the immediacy of DV so easily permits, as when she encounters an eccentric who proudly acknowledges that he has nourished himself solely from garbage over the past ten years, or the well-educated ascetic who cites the nutritional value of various vegetables as he picks them off the ground after a farmer’s market in Paris. Varda’s presence is always purposefully evident: She acknowledges herself in the film’s title as another gleaner, and her voiceover commentary includes ruminations on her role as a gleaner of images, while her camera lingers on objects that fascinate her—the wrinkled skin of her aging hand, the trucks that pass on the highway, the collection of heart-shaped potatoes from her trip to Beauce, now rotting and growing eyes.
—Beverly Berning
FACTOID #27
A surrealist stop-motion animator, the Czech Jan Svankmajer, was the first recipient of the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award in 1997. The POV Award honors the lifetime achievement of a filmmaker who works outside of feature-length narrative filmmaking.
