Digression and Return

SFC 9 (2) pp. 161176 Intellect Ltd 2009 161

Studies in French Cinema Volume 9 Number 2 2009 Intellect Ltd

Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfc.9.2.161/1

KeywordsVardagleaningaestheticspoliticsstructuresubjective

documentary

Digression and return: Aesthetics and politics in Agns Vardas Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000)Ben Tyrer Kings College, London

AbstractAgns Vardas Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000) was made by a film-maker with a history of engagement with political issues and a powerful aesthetic fascina-tion. Reading the film in both the context of Vardas oeuvre and of its production during a period of political reawakening in France, this article suggests that despite its apparent disorder, Les Glaneurs is rigorously structured according to a principle of digression and return. This dialectic is mediated through the theme of gleaning, which serves as a bridge between the films principal concerns: the requirements of survival and of artistic expression. Vardas technique recalls her previous films such as La Pointe Courte (1956) and Sans toit ni loi (1985) and it is in fact the autobiographical dimension of Les Glaneurs that constitutes its greatest digression from the project of social documentary. Crucially, Vardas visual curiosity allows the film to avoid didacticism or utopianism; it tacitly raises political questions but offers few answers. Les Glaneurs operates within the context of a new political cinema dissatisfied with the post-1968 narrative; however, it is not limited to a single discourse. Les Glaneurs is a plurivocal and broadly humanitarian subjective documentary and its over-riding principle is Varda herself.

Agns Vardas Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I (2000) was pro-duced during a time of political reawakening in France, by a film-maker who pre-empted the New Wave, lived through the Second World War and the May 1968 uprisings, and has made political films about Cuba, Iran, fascism, and womens rights. She has been described as a socialist, a feminist, and an idealist. Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse is a documentary inves-tigating poverty, ecology, art and autobiography. It was shot on digital video, and the public response to the film was so overwhelming that it prompted a sequel, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse: deux ans aprs/The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (Varda, 2002). So, how is Les Glaneurs to be understood?

The film comes towards the end of Vardas fourth decade of film-making; her career has seen vast social and political change, and the rise and fall of artistic and cinematic movements. Les Glaneurs is imbued with Vardas his-tory as the mother or even godmother of the New Wave, a Left Banker, a feminist, and a socially aware film-maker (Orpen 2007: 12). She began her career in the post-war environment of 1950s France, where state funding supported documentaries and the recent traumas encouraged these documentaries to bear witness to the situation of the nation (Greene

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1. Her work between the New Wave and Les Glaneurs saw avowedly political films such as Salut les Cubains (Varda, 1963) and Black Panthers (Varda, 1968), explicitly feminist works such as Rponse de femmes (Varda, 1975), films concerned with art, representation and (auto)biography; such as Jane B. par Agns V. (Varda, 1986) and Jacquot de Nantes (Varda, 1990).

2007: 42). Les Glaneurs, with its depiction of Frances destitute, is therefore firmly rooted in this tradition of social document, a defining feature of the work of the so-called Left Bank film-makers. The work of Varda, along with her fellow Left Bankers, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker was, as Jill Forbes suggests, inspired by a socialism of a broadly humanist kind (Forbes 1992: 13), with films such as Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog (Resnais, 1956) and Lettre de Sibrie/Letter from Siberia (Marker, 1958) being paradigmatic examples. Although not a documentary, Vardas first feature, La Pointe Courte (Varda, 1954), presents a neorealist depiction of the plight of poor fishermen in Ste and, in a manner similar to Les Glaneurs, weaves it with another concern: the story of a marriage in crisis. This technique of blend-ing the personal and the political pre-empts the dialectic of documentary and fiction that was one of the aesthetic poles of the New Wave, and is another prominent feature of Vardas work from Clo de 5 7/Cleo from 5 to 7 (Varda, 1961) to Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond (Varda, 1985) (Marie 2003: 71). It is a dialectic that resonates in the complex structure of Les Glaneurs, where the New Wave technique of introducing personal, even autobio-graphical, themes into a film is manifest in Vardas continual self-reflection. Her physical presence in the film complicates the documentary, grounding it in Vardas personal concerns both with herself and other people.1

In her Directors Notes, Varda explains that Les Glaneurs is woven from various strands: from emotions I felt when confronted with precarious-ness, suggesting the socialist-humanist concerns of the Left Bank; from the possibilities offered by the new small digital cameras, suggesting a return to the cinma vrit techniques pioneered by Jean Rouch; from the desire to film what I can see of myself my aging hands and my grey hair, suggest-ing the dialectic of the personal and the political, and a concern with auto-biography; I also wanted to express my love for painting, suggesting very obvious aesthetic considerations. She continues, I had to piece it together () without betraying the social issue that I had set out to address (Varda 2000). With Les Glaneurs, Varda has forged a complex film that interrelates each of her concerns through ludic and imaginative connections that show her to be a film-maker attentive to questions of structure.

Metaphors of craftwork are common in reviews of Les Glaneurs; Zoe Druick describes it as a unique film that courageously weaves astute social commentary together with reflections on art, history and biography (Druick 2001: 33). What such descriptions show is that while the film covers a wide variety of topics, there is an overall coherence to it; despite its jumble of characters and places, Vardas playfulness and meandering enquiries, Les Glaneurs is rigorously put together. Varda describes the film-ing process as an organic one, based on an interplay of text and picture; words give rise to new ideas and call for new images. New information comes up, new contacts. We then go back on the road again (Varda 2000). This approach recalls the production of Sans toit ni loi almost twenty years before, which worked on improvisation and inspiration, tra-versing the countryside and discovering new people. She explains, I allow myself to be taken on an adventure by the process of documentary research (Harkness 1986: 25); this philosophy of adventure-film-making is the same logic that takes Varda from Millet to the home of Jean Laplanche and describes all the points of digression in between. Indeed, her project

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for Sans toit ni loi began as an idea for a film about vagrants who perish in winter and did not become the story of Mona until Varda met a hitchhiker called Settina (Hayward 2000: 270). In this respect, Les Glaneurs could be seen as another permutation of the possibilities Varda explored there, this time producing a documentary rather than fiction film.

Varda explains that when she films she tries to be instinctive, but then when it comes to editing the footage she is strict and trying to be structural (Meyer 2001). As a result, Les Glaneurs is indeed very precisely ordered. There is an overall oscillation that recalls the movement of La Pointe Courte (and its double-scheme borrowed from William Faulkners The Wild Palms). Les Glaneurs moves, for instance, from Millet to the potato fields, then to Breton, and then to Varda herself, and then returns to the potato fields; from art to gleaning for food, to art again, to the film-maker, and back to gleaning; from gleaning for survival, to gleaning for fun and back again; from the aesthetic to the social, and back again. Varda explains, I permitted myself only digressions indirectly related to the topic () But always coming back to the gleaners (Varda 2000). An almost emblematic example of this comes from a sequence in which she finds people reclaiming the copper coils from old televisions to sell as scrap. The camera pans gently across the junk and passes over a television whose broken screen has formed an interesting pattern. The camera continues its movement from right to left but then suddenly darts back to focus on this interesting image, which has clearly caught Vardas eye. In voiceover she says, I looked at the magic screen, and explains that it reminds her of seeing the eclipse on television, and how in the process of making her film she has seen the turn of a century. The film snaps out of its aesthetic rev-erie and returns to the story of these destitute or thrifty urban recyclers and their hammers. This scheme of digression and return is, Varda explains, akin to a jazz concert; at the end of [the] solo, the theme comes back in, and they go back to the chorus (Varda 2000).

If the theme of the film is gleaning, then one of the most prominent and recurrent solos is Vardas love of painting. This duality is best exemplified by what she describes as the two highpoints of making Les Glaneurs: meeting Alain F. in a Parisian market and emancipating Hdouins Les Glaneuses fuy-ant lorage (1854) from an art gallerys storage cellar. Varda saves these two episodes until the very end of the film, again displaying the structure of her editing logic, and suggesting what could be considered the overarching nar-ratives of the film: a social or political concern and an aesthetic fascination.

Vardas concerns, the struggles against oppression in any form political, economic or social (Flitterman-Lewis 1996: 230), are shared by the so-called New Realist cinema that Phil Powrie describes (Powrie 1999: 10). She was a signatory of a Rseau ducation sans frontires (2006) petition to safeguard the education of les jeunes sans papiers (Anon 2006). She shares too a certain scepticism concerning soixante-huitard activism, which is not to say that she did not produce a number of activ-ist films in the 1970s; most notably the militant feminist Rponse de femmes: notre corps, notre sexe/Women Reply (1975), and LUne chante, lautre pas/One Sings, the Other Doesnt (Varda, 1976), but this political awareness was a result of time spent with the Black Panthers in California in the 1960s and her discovery of the Anglo-American feminist movement,


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rather than at the barricades in Paris (Smith 1998: 72, 10304). Her scepticism is expressed in the figure of the goatherd in Sans toit ni loi, who took to the hills as a result of May 1968, and who, Ruth Hottell explains, she describes as a baba-cool; an outdated hippy, a self-serving rebel with-out a clue (Hottell 1999: 686, 693). It is in the wake of the failure of the post-1968 Leftist grand narrative of resistance that the New Realism and Les Glaneurs emerge, presenting instead a disparate, localised (even indi-vidualised () pre-political refusal (OShaughnessy 2003: 192). Although prominent soixante-huitards are still making films see, for example, Goupils response to the struggles of illegal immigrants, Une pure coinci-dence/Purely Coincidental (Goupil, 2002) such interventionist cinema has lost its potency. In its stead, Les Glaneurs offers simply the language of humanitarianism (OShaughnessy 2003: 190), an account of suffering, a depiction of the plight of the excluded, and an investigation of their survival.

It was the emotional impact that this suffering provoked which prompted Varda to reach for her movie camera; she saw old women in the market-place, struggling to bend down to reach discarded vegetables or bread. Given their effort it was clear they had no other choice than this to survive; she thought, Oh my God, these poor people [and] this sentiment led me to make the film. I felt bad for them (Anderson 2001: 24). So, with a similar impetus to that which set her on her course to make Sans toit ni loi, which she described as, my helplessness before people who die of cold, vagabonds in the fields, tramps in the streets (Varda 1994: 40), Varda set off along the roads of France to discover those who gleaned.2 And in Les Glaneurs she found those vagabonds and tramps still in the fields and streets; among the homeless and the unemployed, the displaced and the disenfranchised, she found many gleaners, such as Salomon, an African immigrant who gleaned enough food from marketplace dumpsters to feed his friend Charly and their neighbours for days; great treasures such as fresh fish and poultry, and staples such as bread and fruit discarded once the market closed. She also discovered Claude, a solitary figure in a potato field, filling his bags from the mounds of potatoes rejected because they were too small, too big or too ugly. They return to his caravan and he explains how he lost first his job and then his family to alcoholism; now he spends his welfare money on cheap wine and gleans enough food to survive. Such suffering moved Varda deeply; reflecting on those scenes she says, Sometimes [I was] touched to tears. That one in the caravan was painful (Meyer 2001).

Astounded by the mountains of potatoes farmers dump in their fields and affected by the suffering, Varda contacts Restos du coeur, a charity food program, and representatives come to take away sack after sack of pro-duce.3 This is a rare moment of intervention on Vardas part, whose gen-eral scheme throughout the film is simply to connect to the people that she meets at a human level; recalling her project in Daguerrotypes (Varda, 19745) to get to know the people of her street in Paris. And such human-itarian action, OShaughnessy points out, is not a solution to the systems harshness but rather a kind of compensation for its violence (OShaughnessy 2003: 193). The law too, while ultimately in the service of the status quo, can be seen as an embedded form of the outcomes of earlier struggles and French law contains a number of provisions which relate to the plight of the needy (OShaughnessy 2004: 231). For instance, the tat de ncessit

2. All translations have been made by the author unless otherwise specified.

3. Restos du coeur, founded by the actor Coluche, itself provides another interesting connection between the arts and humanitarian politics.



(state of necessity) mitigates the theft of bread by the starving, and Varda is at great pains to spell out the legal provisions made for gleaners in the French Penal Code. She stands a judge, fully robed, in a field of cabbages to quote Article R-26.10 and an edict dated 2 November 1554 that declare the rights of the gleaner. She focuses too on a court case involving a group of young people who vandalised a supermarket carpark because, they claimed, the owners poured bleach on any waste food to deter gleaners; the owners claim they used bleach only to clean up the mess, and the judge has no choice but to prosecute them. Les Glaneurs bears witness to the process of the system, a system that runs according to Louis Renaults dictum, to live is to consume (Ross 1995: 15). This logic creates a grand narrative of prosperity and well-being, one which, through images of potato mountains and solitary gleaners, Varda reveals to be predicated on exclusion and deprivation, uncovering a subterranean world of poverty and loneliness in the midst of plenty (Scott 2000: 31).

Against this process, Les Glaneurs puts forth a plurivocal commentary of different forms of gleaning (Cooper 2006: 77), each one an individual act of resistance to the hegemonic commercial model. This is exemplified perfectly by the episode at Noirmoutier, where Varda finds a host of gleaners picking oysters at low tide. Ernest Callenbach describes it simply as a wackily charm-ing discussion of exactly how far from the cultivated beds gleaners must stay, but its implications are far more profound (Callenbach 2002: 47). Each gleaner is alone with their rake and their bucket, and as a group they all agree there are a set of rules restricting their access to the commercial shell-fish, but no two gleaners agree precisely on what these restrictions are. There is a general recognition of the system but each gleaner resists it in their own way; some stray too close to the oyster beds, others glean too much. Each gleaner follows their own particular logic and together they show how what is deemed waste by the owners (oysters knocked loose from their beds by the sea) can be reconsidered as useful. This is reiterated by Vardas demo-cratic treatment of [her] interview subjects (Wilson 2002). Just as each gleaner at Noirmoutier is allowed to speak without any one being considered right, each voice throughout Les Glaneurs is treated equally; without pass-ing judgement on them, Varda allows them to speak for themselves.

This reconsideration demonstrates the ethical dimension of gleaning; the practice redeems waste, which qualifies as a modern deadly sin and functions as a modest corrective to the industrial-scale excess produced by the consumer society (Callenbach 2002: 47). When tons of potatoes are left to rot in the fields and vintage grapes wither and die in the vineyard, ethical gleaners such as Franois of Aix are obliged to act. Franois has a a job, a salary, and a social security number, but claims to have eaten out of rubbish bins for the last ten years, and at no detriment to his health. Indeed, he is full of energy as he strides through the town, proclaiming the rights of birds and the stupidity of people who throw things away. The New Statesman may refer to him as a self-aggrandising eco-warrior (Romney 2001: 47), but he is making a stand against an over-arching narrative of French soci-ety, and the hegemony of the sell-by-date. Varda is clearly in agreement with Franois ethics; in Deux ans aprs, they are shown appearing together on the French television program Nulle part ailleurs (Canal+, date unknown) declaring, This wastage is scandalous, so gleaning makes sense.


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Figure 1: A potato gleaner (courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).

Figure 2: Alain F. (courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).



Figure 3: An oyster gleaner in Noirmoutier (courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).

Figure 4: A supermarket protester (courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).

Figure 3: An oyster gleaner in Noirmoutier (courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).


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The other ethical figure in Les Glaneurs is of course Alain F. While he gleans primarily for economic reasons, he devotes a great deal of his time to social projects; he sports an anti-exclusion newspaper jersey at the Paris marathon and devotes his evenings to classes teaching the French language to African immigrants in his neighbourhood. And while Varda devotes con-siderable time in both Les Glaneurs and Deux ans aprs to his pedagogy, her project manages to avoid didacticism. Les Glaneurs is not a motherly lecture urging her children to eat up their porridge (Rosello 2001: 30). The film certainly raises very important questions about the state of contemporary France but Varda does not attempt to adapt the individual lessons in resist-ance to a grander scale. She tacitly raises the question of class by juxtapos-ing the gleaning of destitute Claude with that of a thrifty gourmet chef, but she makes no judgement on the different types of gleaning that she encoun-ters. Elsewhere Varda has dealt with the question of middle-class guilt: in the figure of the professor in Sans toit ni loi. After sending Mona on her way, she has a guilty feeling that she should, she could have done more, and despatches an assistant to find her again (Quart 1986: 8). However, Varda exposes the truth of such guilt when the assistant finally finds Mona; he is disgusted by her and pretends not to have found her. Middle-class guilt, it is clear, is good for hand-wringing only. Les Glaneurs avoids overtones of such guilt through its exploration of the theme of gleaning: Far from construct-ing just another bleeding hearts cryfest, Varda takes Gleaners beyond the existential demands of scavenging to make a case for it as fun (Jacobson 2001: 7). There is a discernable turn in Les Glaneurs at around the thirty-minute mark that is affected by this expansion of the concept of gleaning. Varda asks her judge, what of people who do not glean out of economic need. He replies that they should be considered in a different kind of tat de ncessit, a need for fun, and that they should be covered by the same laws as other gleaners. With this revelation comes a shift in the focus of Les Glaneurs; Varda begins to explore the urban practice of scavenging and encounters a number of artists who work with found objects. This shift is also from purely social to rather more aesthetic concerns as the discourse on poverty becomes a discourse of recycling.

The act of gleaning now becomes a bridge between the requirements of survival and creative expression. Those urban scavengers who glean the streets for junk recuperate their found objects into art objects, and in doing so reiterate the questions of value or usefulness first raised in con-nection with food. Just as the foie gras one day past its sell-by-date is redeemed by a more enlightened soul, so too is the furniture that has gone out of fashion or is broken by the artist-gleaner. Such action contributes to the overall critique of wastefulness in Les Glaneurs, and an artist such as Herv/VR99 adds his voice to the individual, counter-hegemonic strate-gies of the film. He transforms maps of the local dumping grounds, reading them as sites to collect potential works of art rather than places to leave refuse. But in the transformation into the aesthetic there is the risk of alienation; in becoming art objects the origins of rubbish are occluded. Waste is not in fact caused by a problem in the system of production; rather it is as much an integral part as the product itself. Such acts of recycling could be seen as merely a corrective, tidying up behind manufacturing without getting to the heart of the matter.



Varda is certainly sceptical about certain aspects of recycling, which can be seen in her visit to an exhibition entitled, Poubelle, ma belle (dustbin, my beauty). The garish colours of the artworks contrast starkly with muted hues of the rest of the film, and as the children make pretty things from the sanitised Coke bottles and yogurt pots, she wonders how many of them have ever shaken hands with their bin men. While again tacitly rais-ing the question of class, the seemingly idle inquiry brings Les Glaneurs back to the problem of alienation, of where this rubbish has come from. There is a similar danger in Vardas project itself, with its iteration of the similarities between film-making and gleaning. Varda cannot compare her work to that of those who glean food to stay alive without minimising their ordeal, and she is aware of the perilous nature of this metaphor; you can-not push the analogy () its too heavy (Meyer 2001). There is also a danger of idealising gleaners by adopting an overly ethnographic approach. One of the key images with which Les Glaneurs starts is Bretons La Glaneuse (1877), with its depiction of the proud gleaner. This aestheticisation of the gleaner occludes the reality of her social exclusion, and it is an image which Varda is quick to undermine; she poses next to the painting with her own wheat sheaf, which she drops with a grin and picks up her camera. She also speaks of the modest gesture of the gleaner (Anderson 2001: 25), a phrase which evokes perfectly her approach to the subject, and repeats like a mantra, I never forget the people who glean to survive.

However, apropos of Le Bonheur (Varda, 1964) and LUne chante, lautre pas Varda has been accused, whether rightly or wrongly, of a willingness

Figure 5: Poubelle, ma belle (courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).


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to prettify (Forbes 1989: 124). And while this is not to suggest that there is in Les Glaneurs an overt aestheticisation of poverty, there is certainly a preoccupation with the aesthetically pleasing or interesting. It is a preoc-cupation that Varda is happy to acknowledge: It may be unfashionable to say, but I like beauty () though that may seem strange in a social docu-mentary (Darke 2001: 32). It is perhaps less strange in a social documentary made by a film-maker with such a clear interest in art, and painting in particular. The aesthetic moments in Les Glaneurs work as a counterpoint to the images of suffering; they form the other side of the films structural dialectic, constituting a discourse of digressions. These digressions are the moments in which Varda discovers beauty: in the lives (and looks) of the marginaux; in the image of a drowned sheep that recalls her short film Ulysse (Varda, 1982); in the heart-shaped potatoes that she gleans, which are never to be eaten, but rather allowed to grow old and wizened before the camera; and, of course, in the various works of art that she encounters. These artworks appear in Les Glaneurs in one of two modes; firstly as an object, framed within the diegetic space (Smith 1998: 32), such as the works by Millet and van der Weyden, Herv, and the unknown artist in the junk shop. They are images that arrest Vardas camera-eye, just as the heart-shaped potatoes and broken television did. The second mode is the tableau vivant; her pastiche of Breton evokes the many poses of Jane Birkin in Jane B. par Agns V/Jane B. by Agnes V. (1986), and in doing so raises important questions regarding the nature of self-portraiture.

Vardas self-portraiture, her visual self-exploration, constitutes the greatest digression from the project of social documentary. She jokingly told her composer, Joanna Brudowicz, to write a theme for a film about Aging-Agns (Varda 2000), and Mireille Rosello has suggested that Les Glaneurs could be considered as a Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady (Rosello 2001). The interludes in which Varda films her own ageing body, her wrinkled hands, her greying hair, show the film-maker consid-ering her mortality, perhaps brought into sharper focus by the destitute who glean purely for survival. The episodes are poignant and unnerving in equal measure; Varda realizes that she must be close to death because her body is changed so much she fears, as she says in the voice-over, that she is an animal I do not know. Les Glaneurs is, in this sense, a subjec-tive documentary (Cooper 2006: 77), a term applied by Varda first to LOpra Mouffe/Diary of a Pregnant Woman (Varda, 1958) and then to Daguerrotypes; it is as much about the film-maker herself as it is about gleaners. It is not unusual in essay-films of this type for the film-maker to allot to themselves the kind of onscreen face-time usually reserved for box-office stars (Arthur 2003: 58), but Vardas presence in Les Glaneurs is much more than just screen time; the entire film is wholly imbued with her subjectivity. The direction and tone of the film is dictated entirely by her fancy; the chance discovery of the heart-shaped potatoes, which Varda seizes upon with an almost childlike glee, diverts the narration and the documentary: the gleaners story is suddenly interrupted by an autobiographical sequence (Rosello 2001: 31).

Yvette Bir suggests that [w]hat makes Vardas films beautiful is that the idea of death becomes a fertile, vital principle and while Les Glaneurs is



Figure 6: Varda posing as Bretons gleaner (courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).

Figure 7: The animal I do not know (courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).


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Figure 8: The heart-shaped potatoes (courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).

Figure 9: The final shot of the painting flapping in the wind (courtesy of Zeitgeist Video).



perhaps a more ponderously morbid approach to the subject (Bir 1997: 6), death is nonetheless a generative topic in the film. However, a question remains; are these digressions in fact an intrusion upon the film, like Vardas hand which literally breaks into the frame from behind the camera on several occasions. Do these autobiographical episodes get in the way of the social document? There is at least one viewer who thinks so. When Varda visits Alain F. in Deux ans aprs, she asks him what he thinks of Les Glaneurs, what its weak points were. He replies that he is not fond of her presence in the film; when she films her hands and her hair, he explains, I think your self-portrait is () unnecessary. Alain, politically aware and ethically committed, feels that the digressive elements are an obstruction to the film. Implicitly he is suggesting that he would have preferred a docu-mentary that concerned itself solely with a discourse of gleaning as a political act. There is, it seems, a desire among reviewers too that the film be more political. A characterisation of the film as an enterprise that aims not only to portray the world, but also through the immediacy of the video image, to change it (Romney 2001: 48), is symptomatic of a tendency to over-emphasize the rare instances of intervention in Les Glaneurs. Sarah Cooper suggests that in the past [c]ritics have questioned Vardas approach to her subjects, seeing too much of a distorting power struggle that the film-maker wins (Cooper 2006: 79); an observation that could be extended to Les Glaneurs as well. But Varda clearly feels that she struck the right balance between self-referential moments () and moments focused on those whose reality and behaviour I found so striking (Varda 2000). She also identifies another important dialectic in the film: between herself and the audience. Her main aim is to involve people and she suggests that her strategy of subjective documentary means that I give enough of myself, so they have to come to me (Meyer 2001).

It is clear then that Les Glaneurs cannot be reduced only to a political discourse; however, several readings of the film suggest that even the most aesthetic of Vardas concerns can be considered in a more political context. Coopers reading of the film via Levinasian philosophy suggests that Vardas self-portrait is ultimately an ethical project. Les Glaneurs evokes the Levinasian Other, to whom we are obligated in their frailty, and it is the assertion of the primacy of the Other (reiterated in the film by Laplanche) that makes it less a self-centred portrait than one () in which the self is decentred through its concern for others, being rendered unknown and unknowable in the process (Cooper 2006: 89). Vardas interplay of self and other reveals the fundamental interdependency of the two. This presentation of self is anti-narcissistic because the camera refuses to recuperate old age as a non-conformist form of beauty (Rosello 2001: 35). It is the bodys imminent status as waste which sug-gests finally that not everything can be reused but that crucially that which is eliminated is as important, as interesting, as that which is not (Hawkins 2002). Such concerns with the body, OShaughnessy suggests, are a key vector of the wave of socially engaged films that have been such a feature of recent French cinema (OShaughnessy 2004: 220). Vardas concern for her own body connects with the needs of the glean-ers whose struggles for food and shelter are of course bodily concerns. The gleaners bodies are sites of suffering and resistance, detached from


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society, existing only as fragments. Through this aesthetic of the frag-ment, Ruth Cruickshank reads Les Glaneurs in terms of Benjamins essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In the age of global consumption Varda exploits digital technology to edit together her gleaned fragments in such a way as to invite rather than interrupt contemplation, and the fragment concerning Hdouins painting raises questions about the consumption of art, and art as a mode of consump-tion as envisaged by Benjamin (Cruickshank 2007: 121). The aesthetic becomes political for Homay King as well. The heart-shaped potato Varda suggests is the films symbol. Perhaps my emblem, indeed it is an emblem of the fundamental duality of Les Glaneurs: the potential food object become art object. For King it should be reconsidered as a rhizome, a root with underground circuits and radial offshoots (King 2007: 423). Not just a symbol for Vardas editing technique, the rhizome is, apropos of Deleuze and Guattari, a design for social struggle as well (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 328).

Les Glaneurs is not interventionist cinema of the kind produced post-1968 because the grand narrative of such Leftist politics has been broken. From this shattering has emerged a number of fragmentary political films that present multiple, individual and local resistances, and are situated between the elaborated politics that was and the politics yet to come (OShaughnessy 2007: 179). Les Glaneurs presents such a plurivocal con-figuration of the real that is neither didactic nor utopian; it raises political questions concerning humanitarian and ecological issues but offers few answers. It is a wide-ranging documentary that does not limit itself to one particular discourse. Les Glaneurs is foremost an Agns Varda film, and should be understood as a part of her ongoing auteurist project. It con-tains elements of each film that has gone before it and addresses issues of structure and social awareness that have concerned Varda since the begin-ning of her career.

ReferencesAnderson, M. (2001), The Modest Gesture of the Film-maker: An Interview with

Agns Varda, Cinaste, 26:4, pp. 2427.

Anon. (2006), Un appel pour les jeunes sans-papiers scolariss, Le Nouvel Observateur, 14 April, http://www.educationsansfrontieres.org/spip.php?article66. Accessed 7 December 2007.

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176 Ben Tyrer

Suggested citationTyrer, B. (2009), Digression and return: Aesthetics and politics in Agns Vardas

Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), Studies in French Cinema 9: 2, pp. 161176, doi: 10.1386/sfc.9.2.161/1

Contributor detailsBen Tyrer is a doctoral student in Film Studies at Kings College London. His research interests include critical theory and film theory, art cinema, and Left Bank film-makers. His thesis investigates a relation between the historiography of film noir and Lacanian structures of interpretation and meaning. His research is supported by the AHRC.

Contact: Film Studies Department, Kings College London, Strand, WC2R 2LS. E-mail: [email protected]


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