The Gleaners & I and the Aging Body

In terms of the film, The Gleaners and I, Agnes Varda attempts to display through the use of her intellectual documentary what gleaning means in terms of food (fruit, vegetable, bread, etc.) and the body. Her film attempts to break down some stereotypes of the body and what happens with it through age in terms of desire and value.
In her movie, she literally describes gleaning as picking food off the ground from older, abandoned crops or picking food from abandoned markets to picking up items from the street. She goes through many things in her film that relate to picking things up for free in a world full of consumerism. She talks about gleaning in a complexity of many ways. In one part of the film, there was an interview with a man who was “homeless” and living in a trailer home outside of the city near the crops in which many left crops to rot. Varda doesn’t intend to go this way in her film, but meeting this man gives her a “can of worms” to open. He explains that he lost his job, his family and his kids because of alcoholism and is now living in the trailer with another person. He gleans because he doesn’t want the food to go wasted and there is plenty left over. She also films a man (with a “PhD,” which was included for some reason) who went to the market and ate the leftover food. He also showed off his bread that he had gotten from a dumpster behind a store, or somewhere around a store. While she followed him for a few days, he pulled off the impression that he was a very health-oriented guy. He talked about all the vitamins and minerals he was getting from the leftover food and how in ten years he had never gotten sick. She also made a reference that I highly enjoyed at the end of the film; she talked about an antique shop that she had to stop at and she needed to go into. She kind of explained antique shopping as a kind of gleaning because of the treasures she found in the store and the low price they are. Her different variations of gleaning are unprecedented and very unique. I enjoyed listening to what she had to say about the variations of gleaning especially making the connections to all of them.
I also enjoyed her connections to the body, in particular, her body. She had a very big relationship with age. She had a few scenes in which she filmed her hands and her hair. She wanted to make a connection in terms of age and gleaning. As one classmate mentioned in class, her body is socially seen as something that is old and deteriorated and not something that someone would see as desirable, just like the food. It makes sense to all of us because age is something that no one can escape. When she shows the clock with no hands and the cat statues as something that time will never pass by. I think the cat statues represent a figure that is typically alive, but is then a statue. Simple as that. Age here, for her, is seen as something that passes without control, but that the only way to stop it from going is a handless clock. Her gendered body, getting older, is seen as socially undesirable because the society in which we live in values youth and beauty. She makes a very good point through the entire film in demonstrating this point through gleaning and through the gleaning of the body.