The Gleaners and I Retrospective: 
How Agnes Varda Turns Junk into Possibility

 

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” Quoted from Edward Dégas, this notion applies not only to his own great paintings, but to every form of art, especially film, where the eye of the camera seeks to communicate to the viewer through every frame, every sound bite, every aspect of the mise-en-scène. As a result, films can often take on a self-reflective nature. Some find this through the script, while others may achieve it through editing or breaking the fourth wall. Others, such as Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain and Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners & I provoke meaning and connection between the film and the viewer by reflecting upon the various types of media including theater, art and storytelling within the context of the narrative structure.

 

“It’s what I’ve gleaned,” says Varda in her documentary The Gleaners & I, “that tells where I’ve been.” The film, in itself, is an act of gleaning a collection of stories from the various locations in France that Varda travels to, stories of which take the shape of interviewing people from all walks of life. Dziga Vertov writes in We: Variant of a Manifesto that, “Kinochestvo is the art of organizing the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic whole, in harmony with the properties of the material and the internal rhythm of each object.” While Vertov’s montage takes a different approach than the collected stories in The Gleaners & I organized, it is undeniable that they form a larger “rhythmical artistic whole” that capture the essence of each subject that allows the outside viewer to “glean” an understanding of the message Varda is reflecting upon over the course of the film. The film is bespeckled with a miscellany of art of many forms, from the paintings of the greats such as Rembrandt and Van der Weyden juxtaposed with amateurs in their process, such as the totem pole man and the man who retrieves and creates pieces from salvaged material—“anything that’s been sort of discarded by society.” This poignant remark from one of the collected stories resonates deeply with the film’s rhythm of showcasing different examples of gleaning, most often food (leftover, unwanted produce in the city markets, post-harvest crops on the farms and vineyards, recently expired produce taken off store shelves and discarded in the trash) but also several of the subjects themselves that Varda interviews, such as the poor and homeless. The criss-crossing of allusions resulting from Varda’s multimedia usage to weave together the narrative becomes especially discernible whenever she juxtaposes the collected stories to form the “artistic whole,” mapping out the extremes without ever needing to “feed” the information to the viewer—rather, it is up to them to glean the information from the threads of the overall narrative tapestry. Just as Eisenstein states in The Montage of Film Attractions, “A film cannot be a simple presentation or demonstration of events: rather it must be a tendentious selection of, and comparison between, events, free from narrowly plot-related plans and molding the audience in accordance with its purpose.” When the man who lives in a trailer and forages through dumpsters in order to eat is compared with the “thrifty chef” who gleans ingredients from the hills and fields to cook in his 2-star Michelin restaurant, the viewer perceives them both on the same level—as gleaners. In the next sequence, where Varda films the ghastly souls of the sinners in Van der Weyden’s The Last Judgment and cuts to a collected story of the wine farmer in Burgundy that harvests all of the grape vines and deliberately leaves the surplus on the ground so that they are “lost for everybody,” Varda’s juxtaposition of multimedia types and the image of the judgment scale in the painting allows her to make a subtle political commentary on those who see wasting as a sin and those who waste for their own capital gain. Another sequence contrasts a fig farmer who forbids gleaning simply because he owns the place with an actual judge who clarifies that gleaning is completely legal. On their own, each shot is how the scrap artist Louis Pons describes the materials he uses for his multimedia artwork: as “junk,” or meaningless bits and pieces. But Pons resembles Varda in that they both “see it as a cluster of possibilities” to achieve meaning through the organization of the media Varda gleans. Thus, she establishes the rhythm of the film’s narrative through the metaphor of gleaning from the vast array of the multimedia that the film comprises.

 

On the other end of the spectrum, Singin’ in the Rain very clearly establishes its narrative upon the media that it comprises. Given that much of the plot is dedicated toward the exploration of film production, the role of actors, and most significantly, the transition from silent films to talkies, the viewer almost doesn’t blink at the fact that at the meta level, Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain is actually about a film by the same name (as supported by the opening sequence and final shot of the billboard with credits for Don Lockwood and Kathy Selden) that portrays the struggles of producing yet another film, The Duelling Cavalier, that in its later evolution as The Dancing Cavalier contains yet another inception of a fourth film being produced. However, the film chooses to reflect upon itself in this manner in order to openly criticize the media it comprises—particularly, the silent film and the actors and director involved in its conception through the character of Kathy Selden, who mocks Don. “[Silent films] are entertaining enough for the masses, but the personalities on the screen just don’t impress me. I mean, they don’t talk, they don’t act, they just make a lot of dumb show.” This dumb show, incriminated by an inability to “talk” and “act” is manifested in Lina Lamont, who on multiple occasions asks if others think she is “dumb or something.” The film uses musical numbers to showcase the core qualities of the characters, such as Cosmo’s Make ‘Em Laugh and the close bond between Don and Cosmo in Moses Supposes. On the contrary, Lina has no musical numbers at all—her speaking and singing in the talkie is but an illusion. She can only thrive in the context of a silent film and is destined to fade into the relics as a result of her inability to evolve, unlike Don and Kathy, thus representing the death of the silent film itself and the studios (and even theaters) that fail to advance with the times and rapid development of the cinema practice. At the same time, the heavy appreciation for many aspects of musical theater reflects upon the genre of which the film itself embodies, such as when the characters realize that they can “save” the Duelling Cavalier by turning it into a musical, and especially in the scene where Don confesses his emotions toward Kathy. For him, the proper setting is the empty stage, which is questioned by Kathy—but just as Louis Pons sees a “cluster of possibilities” from junk in The Gleaners & I, Don sees the empty stage as a blank canvas brimming with potential. From this canvas, he paints “a beautiful sunset” with the flick of a switch for lighting, “mist from the distant mountains” with another, and “coloured lights in a garden,” which is appropriately accompanied by the twittering bird class of woodwinds in the soundtrack, exactly how a pit orchestra would reflect the onstage action with music in a live theater production. Through the medium of theater, Don transports himself and Kathy to a new world, much like how the usage of musical numbers at the different meta levels of the film allow for the viewer to connect to the common medium and be transported to the single dimension of Singin’ in the Rain despite its multi-dimensional structure.

 

There are countless more examples regarding how these two films reflect on the media of which they are comprised, but one other example I wanted to mention in The Gleaners & I is the soundtrack. The soundtrack (not evening mentioning Varda’s rap) reflects the theme of the film in every way from the instrumentation, an unconventional mishmash trio of fiddle, saxophone, and sometimes piano, to the atonal, 12-tone structure of the music that take bits and pieces of every single note of the chromatic scale at seemingly random order to form a cohesive whole. Inspired by fugal music, contrapuntal fragments of melody overlap to mimic the format in which Varda chooses to tell all of the stories that she has gleaned. Overall, The Gleaners & I and Singin’ In the Rain are two examples of how film can utilize multimedia in vastly different and unique ways to convey a narrative, but they also demonstrate how reflecting upon the media of which the film comprises within the context of the narrative can benefit the viewer’s understanding of the film either as a whole or the underlying meaning it wishes to convey.

 

Bibliography:

Vertov, D. (1984). “We: Variant of a Manifesto.” In Kino-eye, The Writings of Dziga Vertov (p. 8). Michelson, A, editor. Berkeley: California University Press.

Eisenstein, S. M. “Montage of Film Attractions.” The Eisenstein Reader (pp. 35-52). Taylor, R, editor. Powell, W, translator. British Film Institute, 2009.