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One of her best known and loved films, Varda’s ‘The Gleaners and I’ (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000) is a feature documentary that traces the historical practice of gleaning in France and investigates its present-day forms. The beginning of the film consults the dictionary to define gleaning as “to gather after the harvest” and the gleaner as “him or her who gleans”. However, Varda finds that the concept of the gleaner extends beyond the traditions of the harvest into what she calls urban gleaners. Urban gleaners include “dumpster divers” – those who collect eatable food from the trash, artists who use abandoned objects as the material for their creations, and even Varda herself, as a filmmaker who “gathers” images and information to create her films. The overarching narrative is composed of Varda’s road trip throughout France in which she discovers the trajectory of gleaning, from examining its portrayal in nineteenth century art to conducting interviews with all sorts of gleaners, property owners, and lawyers. As in all her documentaries, Varda approaches her subjects unbiasedly, with sympathy and a desire to understand. However, there is a strong socio-political critique present in ‘The Gleaners and I’; it is a critique of a consumer culture that institutionalises unnecessary and abundant waste. It is also a film that gives voice to the marginal characters that, for various reasons, live on the outskirts of this society.
The film is full of interesting and thought-provoking characters, such as the man Varda finds collecting left over food at the market who, although unemployed, voluntarily teaches French to immigrants, or the former truck driver turned full time alcoholic who lives in a trailer in middle-of-nowhere rural France and hasn’t seen his children in three years (both of whom Varda revisits in her follow up documentary ‘The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse...deux ans après’, 2002)), but what I consider to be the most interesting aspect of this film and what positions this film as the stand out documentary of 2000 (it won at least eleven different awards) is Varda’s intermixing of different modes of visuality.
Throughout the film there is what I would call “visual interruptions” of the overarching narrative. Varda’s camera breaks this narrative to poetically examine in close ups or extreme close ups her surroundings: the potatoes in the gleaner’s field, the flowers and plants in the vineyard, the ground of the harvested field, the walls of a building and the roof in her own apartment. Also included in this narrative interruption are Varda’s idiosyncratic moments in which she reflects on ageing, examines her apartment with the camera, and goes through old souvenirs from a trip to Japan. Many of these images are haptic images, and work to provoke in the viewer a tactile vision.
Although fashionable, haptic cinema theory is still relatively new, and therefore, requires a quick summary. Haptic perception includes all tactile, kinaesthetic, and proprioceptive aspects of how we experience touch; haptic cinema refers to a cinema that engages with this sense of touch. We can differentiate haptic visuality from optical visuality: optical visuality is, in a sense, our “normal” way of viewing, dominated by sight alone; it depends on a separation between the viewing subject and the viewed object, while haptic visuality lessens this divide through a bodily engagement with the image. In ‘The Gleaners and I’, the overarching interview-based narrative uses an optical visuality while the visual interruptions adopt a haptic one. Laura Marks’ book, ‘The Skin of the Film’, is the seminal text on haptic cinema; in this book, Marks’ suggests that haptic imagery is used by intercultural cinema because of lack of visual imagery due to forgotten histories and to difficulties in expressing the experience of being dispersed or separated. These deeply personal situations cannot be expressed by audio-visual means alone. According to Marks, ‘haptic images invite the viewer to dissolve his or her subjectivity in the close and bodily contact with the image’1. Marks explains that haptic images often graze the surface of an object, slowly revealing what it is, or in some cases, keeping its identity hidden2. Conversely, they may provide so much detail that the viewer is necessarily drawn into the image. In both cases, the viewer can often only perceive textures rather than completely identifiable objects. This “blurred” vision makes the viewer resort to a bodily interpretation of the image, approaching the image with a tactile intelligence. Haptic images affect the body of the viewer; thus, they “touch” the viewer. It is not in an emotional sense that the images touch the viewer, as in, being “moved” by images; it is, rather, that they create a sensation in the body that is as if it were physically touched.
There are many images in ‘The Gleaners and I’ that evoke texture, and, smell and taste, including extreme close ups of plants and flowers, mouldy walls, and textures of wood. But it is the images of the potatoes that are the most memorable. In ‘The Skin of the Film’, Marks discusses the power of objects used in intercultural cinema to encode and to recall memories; following from Gilles Deleuze’s “recollection-image”, she labels these objects “recollection-objects”. Deleuze’s recollection-image is not necessarily a flashback image but can be any image that ‘represents the former present that the past “was”’3. She uses models of the fossil and the fetish interchangeably to explicate the power of these recollection-objects. The fossil has an indexical relationship to an object that once existed; for example, a fossilized footprint in stone bears witness to a history that has passed4. Similarly, for Marks, the fetish object is endowed with value because of its physical connection to a certain time and place: ‘fetishes get their power not by representing that which is powerful but through contact with it’5. This time and place is often forgotten but the fetish object can bring forth memories of it; simply put, the fossil/fetish object has the ability to encode a certain past through its physical connection with that past, and this past can be “remembered”.
The potato is an object in ‘The Gleaners and I' that is meaningful, both symbolically and in terms of Marks’ fossil/fetish object. After interviewing potato gleaners and learning that over one tonne of potatoes is thrown away after every harvest because of not meeting grocery store size and quality specifications, Varda organises a potato gleaning expedition with a local charity shelter. Varda begins gleaning herself, one hand holding the camera, the other going through the piles of potatoes. Varda discovers that there are many heart shaped potatoes being thrown out, and sentimentally, decides to glean only these. Symbolically, the potatoes could be read as representing the people of ‘The Gleaners and I’, the marginal characters who have been thrown aside by society. The heart shaped potatoes represent Varda’s connection to the gleaners she meets and her sensitivity to these characters of society. The potatoes are also fossil/fetish objects insofar as they have witnessed and been in physical contact with not only the marginal gleaners, many of whom society has chosen not to acknowledge, but also society’s wasteful agriculture system. As Marks says, ‘the indexical capacities of an…object are very important for those who have few sources of evidence, few witnesses to their stories’6. An ostensibly benign object, the potato, turns out to have quite a volatile “memory” in that it has the ability to bring forth memories such as the injustices of large-scale production waste and of society’s marginal characters. It is the potato’s having been there, its physical contact with these things that gives it this ability to trigger memory. And it is through physical contact that these memories are brought forth.
It is the camera’s unique engagement with the potatoes that renders them special or powerful. There are hundreds of objects present in almost every film; we cannot say that every one of these objects has the power of the fossil/fetish. It is the way that they are filmed that renders them as such, and it is here that we return to haptic cinema. The camera’s haptic eye contributes to this as meaning is found in the physical presence of the object not just through intellectual signification. In other words, these haptic images invite us to engage with the images sensuously as well as intellectually. When focused on potatoes in ‘The Gleaners and I’, the eye of the camera assumes the fingers’ role and “touches” them. Varda’s camera examines the piles of potatoes in extreme close-ups, bringing forth the texture of the potatoes; the seemingly unnecessary close-up examination of potatoes evokes our bodily intellect, our senses, in that our eyes begin to feel the rough texture and to smell the rawness and to taste the uncooked potatoes. These bodily senses can also evoke personal memories; for me, it is of washing and peeling potatoes for my mother as a child. The potato is somewhat of an icon for this film, and the heart shaped ones that Varda collects reappear as her table centre piece in The Gleaners...Two Years Later.
So, what is the point of haptic imagery and why is it relevant to ‘The Gleaners and I’ critique of consumer culture? As Laura Marks says, by juxtaposing different orders of images, which in ‘The Gleaners and I’ is what I have differentiated between the optical imagery of the overarching narrative versus the haptical imagery of the ‘visual interruptions’, a disjunction is created between the orders of knowledge7. In regard to intercultural cinema, which tries to capture the disjunctions felt in being situated between two cultures due to diasporas, colonialism, and living as a minority, Marks states that ‘emerging thoughts and things must speak in the terms of the discourse that are established, though at the same time they break away from them. Political (or any) change must be effected in a sort of dance between sedimented, historical discourses and lines of flight8 between containment and breaking free’9. Although ‘The Gleaners and I’ is not intercultural in the way Marks uses the term, they work along these same lines: they both speak in a classic cinematic discourse, but at the same break the codes and expectations of the cinematic. In ‘The Gleaners and I’, some of the interruptions, the haptic images, and specifically the potato images, work to speak on behalf of the marginal characters that are outside of social history and, therefore, of historical discourse; these cinematic disjunctions highlight the divergence between mainstream society and those on the margins. Thus, Varda’s film is like those discussed by Marks because they share a political engagement which aims to make different cultural worlds comprehensible to each other.
‘The Gleaners and I’ is an extremely rich film and provides endless avenues of analysis. Its use of haptic cinema is a small but important part of this film as it exemplifies the experimental, personal, and deeply sympathetic qualities that are present throughout the oeuvre of Agnès Varda. It also shows that Varda, who made this film at seventy-two years old, is a constant force in pushing the boundaries of cinematic expression and creation.
Country: France
Budget: £
Length: 82mins
1 Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
2 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p.162
3 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image,, London: Continuum 2005, p.54.
4 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p.84
5 Marks, The Skin of the Film, pp. 84-85.
6 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p.93
7 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 31.
8 The phrase ‘lines of flight’ comes from Deleuze and Guattari’s first chapter in A Thousand Plateaus in which the concept of rhizome is described. The rhizome is a concept used to describe a way of writing or interpreting theory based in multiplicity; a rhizome is composed of ‘dimensions, directions in motion’, it connects any point to any other point, allowing for non-hierarchical entry and exit points, a middle without beginning or end. The rhizome is made only of lines: ‘lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature’ (21). It is distinguished from the arborescent model which involves vertical, hierarchical lineages, binary or dualist categories. Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’ in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp. 1-25.
9 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p.28.
Bibliography:
Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time-Image,, 2005.
Deleuze, Gilles and Feliz Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Marks, Laura U., The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses, Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.
Filmography:
'The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse)', 2000, Agnès Varda, Ciné Tamaris
'The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (Les glaneurs and la glaneuse...deux ans après', 2002, Agnès Varda, C.N.D.P
Pub/2008
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