The Gleaners and I
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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“Filming” is only an approximation of what Varda does, because her equipment consists of a DV Cam and a Mini DV, both of which use digital videotape that’s later transferred to 35-millimeter film. There’s been a lot of discussion lately about what digital video does for and to filmmaking, and The Gleaners and I demonstrates the positive consequences better than any other documentary I know. (The fiction feature that best does this is also French, Jean-Pierre Sinapi’s wonderful 1999 Nationale 7, which has been shown here just as part of the members-only series Talk Cinema; sad to say, there are no plans to distribute it locally.)
One obvious thing that digital video does is place people on both sides of the camera on something that more nearly resembles an equal footing. A 35-millimeter camera creates something like apartheid between filmmakers and their typical subjects, fictional or nonfictional–because between them stand an entire industry, an ideology, and a great deal of money and equipment. This is the subject of many of Abbas Kiarostami’s major features, including Homework, Close-up, Life and Nothing More, Through the Olive Trees, and The Wind Will Carry Us; he recently shifted to DV in part because he wanted to achieve something closer to equality with whom and what he shoots. Similarly, Varda wants to be one gleaner among others–part of a spectrum of individuals, ranging from homeless scavengers to artists, who roam the street looking for “found” objects to work with.
“I like filming rot, waste, leftovers, mold, trash,” Varda declares with pride at one point in the film. Born in Brussels in 1928, she’s justifiably known as the grandmother of the French New Wave, having started out as a filmmaker in 1954, shortly after Marker and Alain Resnais, both of whom are somewhat older. Yet she’s never achieved the preeminence of some of her “grandchildren”–actually her contemporaries–such as Jean-Luc Godard or Francois Truffaut. I don’t think this can be explained solely by the fact that she’s a woman. She’s made 16 short films and 18 features to date, but many of them are almost impossible to get, which is why I’ve seen less than half of them. I suspect one reason distributors haven’t picked up many of them is that they think her abiding interest in the marginal and ephemeral, along with a certain unevenness, won’t draw viewers.
