Varda focuses her eye on gleaners: those who scour already-reaped fields for the odd potato or turnip. Her investigation leads from forgotten corners of the French countryside to off-hours at the green markets of Paris, following those who insist on finding a use for that which society has cast off, whether out of necessity or activism.
The Gleaners And I, 拾穗者, Los espigadores y la espigadora, 이삭 줍는 사람들과 나, 이삭줍는 사람들과 나, Samlerne og jeg, 艾格妮撿風景, Los Espigadores y la espigadora, Toplayıcılar, Работниците и аз, 拾穗者與我, Собиратели и собирательница, Efterskörd, Os Catadores e Eu, Os Respigadores e a Respigadora, 落穂拾い, La vita è un raccolto
France
Cannes Film Festival
USANR
New York Film Festival
FranceU
JapanG
France
Japan
USA
agnès varda just has this pure, unadulterated love for people and their mundanities and those little parts of life that are overlooked and she is just absolutely my idol
i hope to someday be as content as agnès varda collecting heart shaped potatoes and rapping in her own films
Of the many possibilities that digital cinema provided in changing film, one was simply the new bounty of footage that could be shot without worry. Instead of limiting oneself to what was necessary by the amount of film stock available, Agnes Varda uses digital to search out every crevasse and follow every tangential lead in The Gleaners And I. Varda’s documentary thus follows tangent after tangent. Her interest in historical gleaners brings her to a farm, which takes her to the impoverished community that isn’t completely unaware of the food available to them, which takes her back to Paris to follow gleaners of trash and vegetables, which eventually takes her to a former graduate student who gleans in the morning…
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A study of waste in all its extremity. Most powerful to me in how it connects our inevitable end with our present-day considerations of existence. Agnes Varda filming her own withering hands, acknowledging what's happening to her, will forever be one of the most honest and moving images in movies.
Varda pretending to crush trucks with her hand as she travels along the highway is cinema.
Also dancing lens cap is cinema too.
Creativity born from instability. That's not to romanticize the involuntary hand-to-mouth lifestyles shown within of course but there's a certain necessary inventiveness that arises when faced with constraints and unreliability which is, as Varda shows, a certain kind of 'beautiful' despite (or perhaps in part because of) its reality. When I was living in my college co-ops we would source whatever food was cheapest that season and in general and that often meant not knowing what we would have stocked past a week. Being a head chef it was my responsibility to come up with and prepare meals using whatever cheap foods we had that would feed over 80 people as well as provide a complete-enough nutrition and accommodate practically…
“a clock without hands is my kind of thing. you don’t see time passing.”
agnès varda is my biggest inspiration, plain and simple. it goes beyond everything she did artistically, i aspire to be as caring and generous as she was. with every film of hers i watch, i just get the feeling that she was always trying to be a better person, picking up heart-shaped potatoes and filming everything she felt like filming along the way. viva varda!
Pretty much the main movie to watch if you want to see a big pile of potatoes
last year at tiff i saw agnès varda’s final film, followed by a conversation with small group of women including sarah gadon & lulu wang. at one point, they were all asked to name the first film that introduced them to varda’s work. for everyone there, it was cléo from 5 to 7, but lulu wang decided to shift the question and began instead talking about the film that shaped her the most, which ended up being the gleaners & i. since then i have tried finding it, and i was finally planning on seeing it in theatres a few months ago... but alas. but this month, criterion has finally added all her work to their channel!!
i love being able to…
