What We're Reading
Editor's note: This edition features a motion
picture review.
Agnès Varda,
The Gleaners and I
 Reviewed
by
Dr. Aaron Prevots
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Having asked my students in Contemporary French Culture to
write about films, I wanted to put together a brief look at
one of our favorites: Agnès Varda's The
Gleaners and I.
What especially intrigues me in watching this quiet, conversational
documentary from 2000 is how open it is to interpretation.
It follows the pattern not unusual in French films of examining
an idea from several angles without allowing easy resolution.
Inspired by images in nineteenth-century art of farmhands
gathering the last stalks left untouched on the ground after
the harvest, it features the filmmaker herself setting out
with digital video camera in hand to gather images of people
gathering – be it potatoes, grapes, packaged food past
its sell-by date, or stray furniture in the street awaiting
a new resting place.
Sound too layered and broad? To the film's admirers, that's
much of its appeal. Because Varda interviews all kinds of
people, from farmhands to barkeepeers to artists to those
living without a fixed address, there's a real authenticity
that allows for an open viewer response. Is it a poetic meditation
on time and the evolution of Western consumer society? A biting
social critique focused on people and things that get discarded
and left behind? A gentle reflection on the power of objects
around us to circulate?
For Southwestern's Family Days 2006, Professor of Art Mary
Visser offered a Classroom Exchange entitled "Wave of
Light: poetry is the breath of memory, and sculpture is that
memory in time and space." This title really stuck with
me, and recently got me to thinking how one could refer to
Varda's perspective on gleaning as the breath of memory within
the contemporary social sphere. The film sculpts a vision
not only of people learning to survive through the years,
but also of things in the outer world taking on a life of
their own and transmitting to us a kind of knowledge. It instills
awareness not didactically, but by providing the raw material
for the viewer to explore how and why people and things persevere.
In reconsidering traditions of survival in spite of aging
and hard times, it both shares a portrait of France heading
into the new millenium and gives humble gatherers of all kinds
an unexpected voice.
What We're Reading
features reviews by members of the Southwestern University
community. Some reviews were previously published in the Library's
annual Summer Reading List.
Read
more reviews.
What
We're Reading is a regular
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