The Gleaners and I
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Bodan Litnanski, Fran?ois WertheimerPrimary Contributor: Fran?ois Wertheimer
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: French (Original Language), Unknown; English (Subtitled); English (Dubbed), Unknown
Format: Color, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 142 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-07-23
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Zeitgeist Films
Movie Reviews of The Gleaners and I
Movie Review: While picking through the DVD bins...
Summary: 4 Stars
"Le glanage," French for gleaning, is more or less of a lost art. The sight of armies of bare-armed peasant women, meticulously stripping fields bare after the harvesters have passed, is surely a foregone sight, limited to romantic paintings of the 18th century.
Or is it?
Film maker Agnes Varda turns her camera lenses toward modern day gleaners--the poor, the dispossessed, the ecologically aware and the alienated--to paint a new but still somewhat romantic image of those follow along behind the parade of life, picking through its remains. TGAI might have become a tiresome anti-consumerist, anti-Big Agriculture anti-waste diatribe. But Varda has no illusions that her subjects depend for their very existence on the leavings of modern society and its mechanized agriculture. Indeed, even the laws in France, extensions of ancient law from an agricultural era, are quite friendly toward gleaners. A group of hippie anarchists who had vandalized a gleaner-unfriendly supermarket were basically let off with a warning in spite of their angry courtroom theatrics.
Varda introduces us to those who stalk the streets after dark, searching for discarded appliances to repair and resell. We meet artists whose material is junk from the trash heap, vineyard owners who justify their anti-gleaning stance as a way to maintain product integrity and profits.
And we meet Varda, who inserts herself into her film at every opportunity. Sometimes she comments on her aging, sometimes (as when she filmed herself "catching" passing trucks in her circled fingers) she seems goofily playful. This is a very French movie by a very French artist, which may be a delight or a distraction depending on your tastes.
TGAI is not a must see, but it does offer an interesting and fun look at a collection of real people who don't often earn time in front of a camera. And if you are *really* interested, which regretfully I was not, the DVD offers a one-hour sequel on the subject.
Summary of The Gleaners and I
Agn?s Varda, Grande Dame of the French New Wave, has made 2001's most acclaimed non-fiction film-a self-described "wandering-road documentary." Beginning with the famous Jean-Fran?ois Millet painting of women gathering wheat left over from a harvest, she focuses her ever-seeking eye on gleaners: those who scour already-reaped fields for the odd potato or turnip. Her investigation leads us 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. Varda's own ruminations on her life as a filmmaker (a gleaner of sorts) give her a connection to her subjects that creates a touching human portrait that the L.A. Weekly deemed "a protest film that's part social critique, part travelogue, but always an unsentimental celebration of human resilience." This Edition features the 60-minute follow-up film GLEANERS: TWO YEARS LATER.Art House & International DVD Video
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