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How to watch The Gleaners and I
2000 · Agnès Varda · The Gleaners and I on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Varda 'catch' passing trucks between her fingers on camera. (performance)
She films her own aging hand in close-up, closing her fingers around trucks rushing by on the motorway as if gleaning them.
Payoff: The gesture tells you filming and gleaning are the same act before she ever says so. In the reading: the-gest. The reading calls this a gest: a posture that exposes a whole relation, here between Varda, her subjects, and her own mortality.
Notice paintings of gleaners appear between scenes of real gleaners. (setting)
Varda keeps returning to Millet's and Breton's canvases, holding the composed painted image against her own loose, contingent digital footage.
Payoff: The contrast keeps asking what changes when the same subject moves from oil paint to handheld video.
Listen for Varda's voice sliding from a subject to herself. (sound)
Her narration moves from a farmer's field to a thought about her own hands within a single sentence, without ever announcing the turn.
Payoff: The narration is what turns plain observation into something closer to a personal essay.
Watch how Alain describes his own choice to eat what's discarded. (performance)
Varda lets him explain himself at length, on principle as much as necessity, rather than narrating over him or summarizing his situation.
Payoff: He gets to define his own dignity instead of having the film define it for him. In the reading: fabulation / legending. The reading calls this fabulation: a person caught in the act of telling his own life into dignity, on camera.
Notice how the film drifts from a field to a museum. (cutting)
Varda's editing moves by rhyme and association rather than argument, letting one image suggest the next instead of building toward a thesis.
Payoff: The film thinks out loud in front of you instead of handing you a conclusion.
Once you have seen it
Watch for the forgotten camera filming its own swinging lens cap. (cutting)
Varda leaves the camera running by accident, and instead of cutting the mistake, she keeps it and sets it to music.
Payoff: She treats her own accident the same way she treats a discarded potato, as something worth keeping. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: an image where you feel the camera itself perceiving, not just showing you something.
Notice the French title names Varda among her own subjects. (structure)
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse puts the filmmaker inside the group she's filming, not standing outside reporting on them.
Payoff: By the end, the film has made itself one more thing it gleaned.
Watch Varda study her graying hair as closely as a potato. (performance)
She turns the same unsentimental, curious attention on her own aging body that she gives to the gleaners and the discarded produce.
Payoff: By the end, mortality itself has become one more thing she's gleaning.
Carry this in: Watch her hand. Varda films it the same way she films a gleaner, reaching for what would otherwise be lost.