LES GLANEURS ET LA GLANEUSE/ THE CLEANERS AND I

France, 2000, 82 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Agnes Varda.

With The Gleaners, Agnes Varda looks at the dictionary meaning, traces the entomology, looks at 19th-century French art, especially Millet, with his pictures of Gleaners. During the film, the director develops the different ideas of Cleaning and how they can be applied in the 20th century, the realities of people following harvesting in the fields, people discovering where there are remnants of food and crops, the gleaning of what might be called scavenging in the rubbish heaps, in the bins outside restaurants with the abundance of food thrown out. There is also the examination of many works of art, pictures of the Last Judgement, gleaning in art, but also artists who collect what might be discarded as junk and are creative in putting pieces together artistically.

The cinematography is particularly striking, and some glimpses of Agnes with her camera, praising the digital developments by the end of the 20th century, illustrating how she can film – fascinated with the number of trucks on the highways and her framing them with her hand and fingers.

We are also introduced to a great range of people, the gleaners in the field with their explanations, those who discover abandoned vineyards and other fruitful areas for search. There are extensive encounters with people who scavenge, foreigners who have made their home in France, single mothers, all searching for food – as well as enthusiastic gleaners who contribute to charities which distribute food. And, there are a number of artists explaining their work.

Agnes Varda is very genial in the searches, travelling throughout France, encounters with a great range of people, alerting audiences to the tradition of gleaning and its laws from earlier centuries, but also alerting people to the amount of wasted food in our society and the needs of those who do not have advantages.

Along with Faces/Places and Agnes by Varda, this film would serve as an excellent introduction to her previous experimental work and her shorts and documentaries. Two years later she visited many of these people again and made another documentary which ran for about an hour.