This blog post explores how the act of gathering, as depicted in Agnès Varda’s documentary ‘Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse’, prompts us to reconsider the relationship between individual lives, society, art, and ethics.
“I’m filming people who collect discarded things to survive. Like writing a diary, I record them and record myself.”
In the past, commoners would often bend over to pick up grains fallen in the fields after harvest, gathering what was left behind. So what meaning does the act of ‘picking up’ hold for modern people?
Taking the single act of ‘picking up’ as its common thread, this 63-minute film unfolds through the steady, unhurried voice of Grandma Agnès from beginning to end. She tells the story of the ‘pickers’ and ‘me,’ just as the title suggests. Following her voice leads us into a narrative about society, and further, evokes a sense that we are participating in the events alongside her. It feels like embarking on a journey with her in a small car, searching for people.
Agnes, at the forefront of the French film movement ‘Nouvelle Vague,’ which began in the late 1950s and peaked in 1962. The first of her documentaries I encountered was actually ‘Agnes Varda’s Beach’. It was refreshing. She deliberately blurs the boundaries between documentary and feature film. The mirror object on the beach that appeared in the opening scene was perhaps the most evocative and powerful moment, representing Agnès herself in multiple forms. It remains unforgettable, personally the most impactful scene. Her documentaries evoke a profoundly social yet simultaneously ‘artistic’ sensibility. This stems from the sequence of images she presents with extreme subjectivity.
She actively injects interconnectivity between works into her scenes. For instance, in this work, “Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse,” she begins by presenting Jean-François Millet’s artwork as the first sequence to unfold the narrative. Moreover, her methods for presenting the artistic images she envisions are diverse. She sometimes introduces objects she has created herself into the frame, creates images through video, or shows them by filming other people’s artistic objects.
Despite being a documentary, her work is intensely subjective and assertive. “Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse,” unapologetically and uncompromisingly imbued with leftist political consciousness, oscillates between meditations on life, death, and art’s social role, remaining dedicated from start to finish to society’s discarded and marginalized figures. Yet Agnès does not allow the film to escape her control. Consequently, rather than sinking into heavy or oppressive emotions, the audience experiences a sensation akin to sitting in the passenger seat of a car driven by a master, calmly observing the unfolding landscape. Starting with the scene of picking ripe figs and eating them on the spot, a critique of the greed of the wealthy and selfish begins naturally.
The documentary primarily unfolds through interviews, accompanied by narration. This narration is not expository but rooted in personal experience. Its approach seems to partially resemble the expository style among the six documentary forms proposed by Bill Nichols, particularly in how commentary can imply specific ideologies and become subject to ethical and political debate. However, it clearly differs in that it does not directly persuade or impose a specific message on the audience through authoritative commentary. Furthermore, it actively reveals the filmmaker’s subjectivity and subject matter, avoiding a fixed observational frame. Instead, it appears strongly influenced by the participatory style epitomized by Cinéma vérité. She incorporates her own proactive image and voice into the camera, even using rap tracks expressing her thoughts as background music to unfold the stories of the scavengers.
Truth is not discovered by waiting; it emerges from a latent state through intervention. The characteristics of the interactive style include the filmmaker’s exposure, participation in events, stimulation and interference with subjects, active use of interviews, the filmmaker’s personal perspective on both the present and the past, the relationship between past and present, and the influence of the past on the present. These are the core characteristics of the cinéma vérité style as summarized by Bill Nichols.
Agnes clearly demonstrates this proactive role throughout the work. It is evident that she was deeply influenced by the concept of cinéma vérité, specifically its interactive characteristics. The first part of the work introduces various artworks and materials sent by audiences as a response to previous works. Among these are pieces that transform the social awareness felt after watching the film back into art. The director sought to incorporate these into her own film, and in subsequent scenes, these artworks appear, forming symbolic shots. She also deliberately creates artificial situations to bring truth to the surface of life.
As the title reveals, the work is “The Gleaners and I.” It does not merely depict people performing the act of gleaning as subjects of a conscious ceremony. Instead, the director herself appears as the subject ‘I’ within the footage, placed alongside those performing the same ceremony in the cold city. And she begins a story about them and ‘me’. By interweaving her own daily life, she adds another layer of intimacy: a round palm trying to capture a line of large cargo trucks, white hair peering into a newly purchased digital camera, the small pleasures of discovering a heart-shaped potato or tasting discarded grapes, and scenes playfully mimicking poses beside large masterpieces. Through these moments, the film quietly declares her kinship with them, not with solemnity but with a willingly joyful approach. The only difference is that while they are beings placed within a social position, she occupies the position of an artist collecting and bearing witness to them.
The images of these people, united by the common denominator of ‘picking up,’ mostly maintain full shots without imposing excessive emotion. Agnès repeatedly lists only the act of concentrating on picking something up, posing a silent question to the audience. This approach is closer to the film’s poetic function of condensing emotion by showing less, rather than leveraging its characteristic as a medium that can ‘show and explain more.’ Within the observational long shot frame, the characters’ emotions condense and spread out like ripples through the long take.
No bourgeois figures appear amidst their repetitive actions. Like the figures in Jean-François Millet’s “The Gleaners,” they survive in the cold city by gathering discarded items, leftover food, and fallen fruit. Their appearance can resemble that of solitary monks silently continuing their practice. The people gathered by the act of ‘gathering’—their stories, circumstances, and reasons for gathering—are all different. The layers of their lives unfold: those who gather to sustain their livelihoods, those who gather nostalgia for time passed, those who gather out of philosophical conviction, those who gather as part of a social movement, those who have gathered for over a decade to make ends meet, and even those who gather leftovers from the vegetable market.
The camera movements capturing the act of gathering and the frames capturing the interviews are distinctly different. During the interviews, the director uses close-ups to observe their faces and hands. The intimate framing reveals stammering expressions, deeply etched wrinkles, tangled hair, and dusty sweaters with meticulous and emotional detail. These images form a powerful vector, while the director’s voice becomes more focused yet natural. Suddenly, she brings her own hands into the frame. Adding to others’ stories, she says ‘strange’ while close-up on her own wrinkled hands. Thus, she always presents others and ‘me’ together, showing both existences within interaction.
Throughout the conversation, the director uses sometimes others’ voices, sometimes her own voice, and sometimes symbolic imagery. Symbolic images utilizing freeze frames contrast with the unstable movement of handheld shots, creating shots with strong pull. Transitions from close-ups to medium shots, flashback shots in the latter part, montages arranging previous characters, and editing techniques overlapping sound between shots all naturally connect the film’s flow.
This work does not present a message converging into a single definition. The director juxtaposes multiple meanings through various structural devices. Themes she wishes to convey are dispersed across multiple layers: subtitles that seem to divide scenes, diary-style confessions, insertions of scenes from previous films, the presentation of art objects, and even an original song titled ‘Recycling Rap’.
「Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse」 portrays resistance against overconsumption capitalism as a small-scale practice, embodied through the ‘recycling of discarded things’. This voice of resistance is expressed not through Western classical music but through hip-hop rap, with its direct lyrics laid over the images. Yet Agnès deliberately avoids letting social criticism devolve into radical agitation. While maintaining a critical gaze, she does not hesitate to question personal memory, encounters, and love. In this way, social issues, life, and memory intertwine to explain our existence.
Agnès Varda is a director who has deconstructed and reconstructed traditional film techniques to build her own unique language. Her feature films and documentaries freely traverse the boundaries between fact and fiction, the individual and society, objectivity and subjectivity. Rather than following specific events, her films resemble stories that split apart and reconnect like streams of consciousness. As she described herself as “disorganized and fond of dreaming,” her films are also living, breathing worlds where diverse elements collide.
Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse is the work where this approach is most clearly evident. It freely traverses photographs, paintings, footage, and reality, embracing even chance as part of the film. She discovers connections among discarded, seemingly useless things, weaving them together. From these gathered fragments of life, she creates a living portrait of contemporary French society.
She does not preach outdated theories. Instead, she simply shows that “they don’t want to be kind people.” This raw truth resonates throughout the film, centered on the modern gleaners—those who survive by collecting discarded food. This documentary juxtaposes the difficult issue of social inequality with art’s healing nature, ultimately concluding as both social critique and travelogue, while simultaneously offering a non-sentimental tribute to human resilience. And in the end, it leaves a quiet yet firm declaration: that everyone navigating life’s obstacles is, in a way, an artist.
