Gleaning for Meaning

The Gleaners and I begins with an open dictionary that enlightens viewers with the literal definition of what it means to glean, explaining the term to signify “to gather after the harvest”. However, throughout the film, Agnes Varda elaborates upon this notion to expand the viewer’s conceptualization of gleaning and lace political implications into the picture. To glean is to collect that which is unmarketable, unsellable, undervalued, or unwanted, and throughout her documentary film, Varda explores the myriad faces and facets behind gleaning. While the gendered and classed practice bears long historical and cultural inferences that are seemingly eradicated due to the efficiency of modern machinery, urban and rural gleaning has evolved and continues to thrive in various subsets of contemporary French culture. Varda defines gleaning through the conversations she holds with interviewees in the film. Teeming with stigmas of dirtiness, contemporary gleaning is viewed as socially unacceptable through the eyes of the mainstream. By foraging for connections with the individuals who engage in the practice of gleaning in its various forms, Varda humanizes the lives that survive by way of gathering that which has been dismissed as waste and cast aside. The film invites viewers to consider the overproduction of goods in a capitalist economy, which is intrinsically linked to the politics of waste and implies an ethical argument for gleaning.

Navigating through different spaces and sharing exchanges with various gleaners, the definition of gleaning is expanded and abstracted by the people and practices that are intwined within it. From exploring the roots of gleaning, historically a female-centered, rurally situated practice, Varda engages with the ways in which the practice has evolved to fit within the lives of those who do it today. Engaging with a man foraging for potatoes out of necessity, a chef who gleans out of frugality, an artist who create with the “presents left on the street”, clam and oyster gatherers, a family who struck luck at an abandoned vineyard, squatters who retrieve supermarket “waste”, people at an apple orchard, and a man with a Masters degree who frequents the leftovers of a street market and volunteers his time as a French as a second language instructor, Varda herself is a gleaner of personalities that the social world has cast aside. Her camera gathers glimpses of conversations and interactions to cultivate something as extraordinary as her own hands. Just as one man stated that he “makes sentences with things”, referring to the objects he rummages through as words in a dictionary, the frames captured by Varda’s camera act in a similar way. Gleaning through the images gathered, she picked certain pieces to construct this very film.

Varda allows her own body to become associated with that which gleaners seek. As an elderly woman, her body is no longer deemed valuable by ageist societal valor. However, like a gleaner who appreciates the beauty and sustenance provided by foraged food, she acknowledges her own astonishing corporeal transformation and turns the camera upon herself. In doing this, she allows the politics of waste to transpire through her own skin in the most personal sense. It is through her own body, a site where she has gleaned her own beauty, that she further explores and complicates how gender and the politics of waste are at work in gleaning. Once a highly feminized practice that took place in rural areas, the vast majority of her conversations regarding contemporary gleaning involved exchanges with men. In this sense, the work of gleaners has bent gendered notions and has been taken up by male and female bodies. Since gleaning is no longer a socially acceptable for anyone to do, the gendered connotations of who gleans have become less relevant, and the high feminization of the work has diminished since society condemns all bodies engaged in such work. The laws surrounding gleaning have not changed since the 1500s, highlighting the severe social pressures to participate in the capitalist system that have become increasing enforced. Such influences seek to solidify the boundary between that which is and is not consumable, between trash and treasure, that which generates a profit and that which does not.

Society itself becomes positioned along these lines, and this is especially evident here in the politically charged city of Berkeley. Even the most passionate activists often hesitate to even acknowledge members of society who live on the streets. Abstaining from the capitalist system of using money to consume, bearing connotations of financial survival and greed, new potentials for spaces for communities and reimagining familial structures are opened. Varda interviews Solomon, who lives with his friend who has allowed him to stay in his home. As a gesture of gratitude and an act of cooperation, Solomon gleans urban trashcans for food and they cook meals, which are enthusiastically shared with friends and neighbors. Paying rent is irrelevant, as reciprocation is fulfilled in other ways. Positioned outside of the capitalist system, the nuclear family is rendered seemingly irrelevant and new spaces for kinship are opened. Beauty is gleaned out of that which is deemed as socially unwanted. Desire and beauty are reframed and resituated through the eyes of those who see it, wherever it lies, waiting to be gleaned.

The following is a link to beautiful artwork created through gleaned materials:
http://artinspired.pbworks.com/Found-and-Recycled-Art

jeni