The Gleaners and I · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the hand. Varda holds up her own aging hand to the lens — spotted, wrinkling, filmed by the other hand — and "captures" trucks on the motorway between her fingers as they rush past. It is a joke and it is not. She is doing to the trucks exactly what a gleaner does to a reaped field: reaching down for what the harvest left, closing her fingers around what was going to be lost anyway. In one gesture she tells you that filming and gleaning are the same verb, and that the thing she is most curious about salvaging is herself.

That gesture is the key to the whole film, so let me borrow a word from Deleuze for it: the gest. Deleuze uses it for a posture or attitude that stops being merely physical and starts exposing a relation — the body caught in the act of meaning something. Varda's hand does that twice over. It shows the relation between her and her subjects (both stoop, both salvage), and it shows the relation between a person and her own mortality. This is what Deleuze called a cinema of the body: film in which duration is carried not by a plot but by flesh — a face, a hand, a spine bent to the ground. Varda studies her graying hair the way she studies a farmer's bins of unsold potatoes, unsentimentally, as matter that time is working on. No action resolves this. Nothing is at stake that a decision could fix. We are firmly in what Deleuze called the time-image: the character no longer acts on a situation, she watches it, endures it, thinks it.

And she films herself watching. When Varda films her own hand with her other hand, something odd happens that the older documentary could not do: we feel the camera. We are not looking through an invisible window at the world; we are aware of a person perceiving, and of the machine registering her perceiving. Deleuze has a name for this doubled perception — the dicisign, the image in which the camera perceives a character who is herself in the act of perceiving. The lightweight digital camera is what made it cheap and intimate enough to sustain for a whole film. That is Varda's specific invention here, and it is genuinely hers: she took the throwaway consumer camcorder of the year 2000 — the accident-prone, always-rolling, one-woman tool — and made it a first-person instrument of thought. She gleans images the way Alain gleans market vegetables, keeping what a bigger production would discard.

The most famous instance is the "dance of the lens cap." She forgets to switch off the camera; it swings on its strap; it films its own cap bobbing against the ground. A mistake. She keeps it, and scores it to music. Here the camera is briefly freed from any human eye — vision without a center, the apparatus filming itself, the world filming itself. Deleuze would call this pure image matter, the camera-eye as a thing among things rather than a servant of a viewpoint. Most directors cut it. Varda's whole ethic is that you don't cut what the machine caught by accident; the accident is the gleaning.

Why does this lens open the film and not flatten it? Because it explains why the film has no argument and refuses one. Varda structures it as a wander — field to green market to junk-artist's studio to museum — by rhyme, not logic. Deleuze called this drifting shape the balade, the stroll or trip that transforms nothing and is not supposed to. The point is not to reach a thesis about waste; it is to let a curious mind connect a Millet canvas to a bin of bruised peppers to its own skin, and to trust that the connection is the thought. The essay film thinks in front of you instead of delivering conclusions.

There is a politics in this, quiet but real. When the gleaners defend their ancient right, when Alain — a man with a master's degree who eats discarded produce on principle and teaches literacy at night — explains himself, they are not being reported on. They are, in Deleuze's word, fabulating: caught in the act of telling their own lives into dignity. And Varda's camera fuses with them. The untranslatable French title, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse — the male gleaners and the female gleaner — puts the filmmaker inside her own subject, so that author's vision and subjects' vision speak together. Deleuze called that fusion free-indirect discourse: the camera speaking not about the marginal but alongside them. A scattered non-people — the poor, the frugal, the salvagers — becomes briefly visible as a we.

The lineage is exact. From Marker's Sans Soleil she takes the reflexive first-person voice threading unlike footage into meditation; from Le Joli Mai, the roving practice of stopping ordinary people until testimony becomes a social portrait; from Buñuel's Land Without Bread, the essayistic voice over images of rural poverty — which she warms from irony into tenderness. Her own Daguerréotypes and Vagabond had already built the cinécriture, the writing-with-camera, that she now collapses into a solo digital hand. And forward: nearly every intimate, first-person DV documentary of the next two decades is standing in the field she reaped.

Watch it again for the hand. Once you see that filming is gleaning, you can't unsee it — and you start to notice how much of what any camera does is simply refusing to let a thing be wasted.