THE GLEANERS & I
The compensation of what remains behind is the subject of septuagenarian French
filmmaker Agnès Varda's petite masterpiece of found and fondly preserved
art. The "grandmother of the French New Wave" (her 1961 film Cléo
from 5 to 7 is one of that movement's underrated classics) explores in this
free-associative documentary the world of the gleaners, those permitted by
French law to pick up the remnants in a harvested field after the landowners
have taken their fill. Her style, of course, is also a kind of gleaning: bits
and pieces of images taken by her prized digital camera of rural and urban
indigents and artists who find subsistence and inspiration in what the rest of
society has abandoned. There are the homeless who take advantage of the
perfectly good vegetables tossed away because they are not cosmetically
acceptable for the produce department; there are the young rebels who defy the
law by rummaging through dumpsters, and the collage artist who transforms trash
into haunting tableaux. And there is Varda herself, who includes among her
treasures saved from oblivion a potato shaped like a heart and a video image of
her own age-ravaged hand. A heartwarming look at the need to salvage and redeem
and a witty and eloquent meditation on mortality and rebirth, The Gleaners
& I is a tribute to the fertility of women's cinema. At the Cable
Car.
Issue Date: November 30 - December 6, 2001
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