Hacker Cinema
The Gleaners and I
Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse
2000 · Film · documentary · 82 min
Directed by Agnès Varda
Varda focuses her eye on gleaners: those who scour already-reaped fields for the odd potato or turnip. Her investigation leads from forgotten corners of the French countryside to off-hours at the green markets of Paris, following those who insist on finding a use for that which society has cast off, whether out of necessity or activism.
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5 comments on Hacker News
The story about free potatoes in Berlin reminded me of that film by Agnès Varda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners_and_I
It's also interesting - as she is explaining in the movie - that the words that are used to describe this activity (glaneur/glane, to glean, nachlesen) have this particular meaning that's slowly fading (roughly "picking leftover stuff after the actual harvest"). However in modern French it now seems be used do describe dumpster diving.
Here is the list from the thread: --- 1. A Man Named Pearl
2. Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland
3. Microcosmos
4. Crip Camp!
5. Keep The River On Your Right
6. All The Beauty And The Bloodshed
7. Harlan County USA
8. Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story
9. Good Night Oppy
10. We Met in Virtual Reality
11. All That Breathes
12. Still
13. Can’t Be Stopped
14. The Amazing Jonathan Documentary
15. Searching for Sugarman
16. AKA Mr Chow
17. The Pigeon Tunnel
18. Little Richard: I Am Everything
19. I Know That Voice
20. Genghis Blues
21. Kings of Pastry
22. 20 Feet From Stardom
23. Stevie
24. Anvil: the Story of Anvil
25. Searching for Sugar Man
26. King of Kong
27. The Gleaners and I
28. Touching the Void
29. Cane Toads: An Unnatural History
30. 20 Days in Mariupol
31. Minding the Gap
32. How to Survive a Plague
33. Speciesism
34. Free Solo
35. Jim Allison: Breakthrough
36. Seven Up! series
37. Bowling for Columbine
38. The Fog of War
39. Rivers and Tides
40. Capturing the Friedmans
41. Spellbound
42. King of Kong
43. Crip Camp
44. Jesus Camp
45. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
46. Flee
47. Man on Wire
48. Queen of Versailles
49. The Thin Blue Line
50. Time Indefinite
51. The Gleaners and I
52. My Life as a Turkey
53. Happy People
54. Grizzly Man
I love Varda so I’ll bite.
Off the top of my head, her most HN-relevant movie is The Gleaners and I. In France, there’s a right to glean — to harvest food that will not otherwise be harvested. (Actual French people should help explain that better.) Varda made a movie about gleaners, which covers everything from people living without a home to people making art from found objects to herself.
It’s HN-relevant because finding usefulness in seemingly useless material has the hacker nature. It’s also HN-relevant because she used a new fangled digital camera and it’s absolutely wonderful watching a master director explore what she can do with new technology.
She was always enthused about working with technical constraints. One of her lesser movies, Daguerréotypes, was a documentary about the street she lived on. She was pregnant when she made it, so her limitation was the 300 foot long power cables for her equipment.
Varda is also one of the few directors I know who loves postmortems. Both the movies I mentioned above have sequels revisiting their topics and discussing how the act of making those movies affected the people who were observed. She also revisited her own life with two late career retrospectives, and her husband Jacques Demy’s career with a biopic, a retrospective on his overall life, and a specific retrospective about one of his movies.
She was above all else an observer of life. I recommend her work highly. It’s easily available on the Criterion Channel and much of it is on Kanopy, free with a US library card.
You just made me recall one of my favourite movies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners_and_I
Having juat learned that half of my prine tree was emptied out I have I a hard time right now enjoying this article.
O well, I was somewhat consoled by my neighbour how pointed me to 'Les glaneurs et la glaneuse', a documentary by Agnes Varda about people who try to live on waste fruit and vegetables in Paris. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners_and_I