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Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la

glaneuse
Mireille Rosello
Published online: 03 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Mireille Rosello (2001) Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, Studies in
French Cinema, 1:1, 29-36

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 Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse
Portrait of the Artist as an Old Lady
Mireille Rosello

Abstract
Agnès Varda’s latest documentary, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/Gleaners and I, was presented
at the fifty-third International Festival at Cannes, in May 2000. Her points of departure are a
word looked up in the Larousse dictionary (‘glaner’), the reproduction of the canonical painting
that illustrates the article (‘Les glaneuses’ by Jean-François Millet), and more importantly, her
interest in the ‘urban gleaners’ who live in her neighbourhood. Varda’s original concern, respect and
curiosity for those (extra)ordinary people who collect fruit and vegetables abandoned on the
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marketplace becomes a ludic road-documentary about different examples of gleaning, different types
of gleaners. Two apparently disconnected narrative trends are woven into this film. On the one
hand, as is often the case, Varda’s poetic rêverie on the pleasure and violence of gleaning is
accompanied by a serious exploration of the resemblance between filming and her subject matter:
this is a portrait of the artist as ‘glaneuse.’ On the other hand, another visual story keeps proposing
to the viewer a self-portrait of the artist as an old lady. I propose to explore the curious counterpoint
between the two layers of self-portraits in order to verify the validity and the limits of Varda’s self-
reflexive cinematographic theories as they are tested by the documentary’s internal interpretative
grids.

In retrospect, it seems perfectly appropriate that Agnès Varda’s latest documentary, Les 1 The English title,
Glaneurs et la glaneuse, should have been presented at Cannes in the ‘hors competition’ Gleaners and I, cannot
category. After all, this (com)passionate portrait of originals and marginals who find keep the tongue-in-
cheek opposition
desirable objects where others see only garbage is an implicit critique of the ways in between male gleaners
which our Western societies sort, choose, select, reject or even rank.1 (‘les glaneurs,’ a collec-
The tone of a few recent movies (Eric Zonca’s La Vie rêvée des anges/ The Dreamlife tive object of study and
of Angels, 1998, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s La Promesse, 1996 or Rosetta, 1999) a rewriting of the femi-
indicates that contemporary French and francophone film-makers take a renewed nine pictorial models by
Jean-François Millet or
interest in the representation of poverty and exclusion but Varda did not wait until the Jules Breton) and the
1990s to focus on the disenfranchised and the have-nots.2 And if other directors have female author as gleaner
portrayed marginalisation by telling the stories of unforgettable heroes,3 Varda has (‘la glaneuse’), whose
always used her camera slightly differently: she is just as interested in creating fascinating film is also a self-
fictive ‘vagabonds’ as in exploring the ways in which her culture encodes and defines portrait. I have kept the
French title throughout
excluded insiders. Consequently, even her accounts of the most personal of experiences to avoid muting the
(her own pregnancy in L’Opéra-Mouffe or mourning for her spouse in Jacquot de Nantes, gender distinction. Four
1990) are always accompanied by a layer of intense self-reflexivity. Each topic is other French films were
explored in depth and in such a way as to draw our attention to questions that would be selected to be presented
ancillary to other films: the cinematographic representation of the issue, and the at the fifty-third
International Festival at
question of the audience’s involvement. Jane B. by Agnes V. (1986–87) can just as easily Cannes, in May 2000:
be described as a portrait of Jane Birkin, a portrait of Agnès Varda, a portrait of a Esther Kahn by Arnaud
director making a portrait, and a portrait of a model being represented. Desplechin, Les destinées
Similarly, Varda’s latest film is much more than a series of interviews with those sentimentales by Olivier
urban poor who look for food in the trash cans of supermarkets, or collect the fruit and Assayas, Code inconnu by
Michael Haneke, and
vegetables abandoned on the marketplace. It is a poetic and theoretical essay on how we Harry, un ami qui vous
define and represent refuse and waste, on how gifts, expenditure and recycling are veut du bien by Dominik
Moll.

SFC 1 (1) 29–36 © Intellect Ltd 2001 29

 2 One could argue that encoded by our post-industrial and globalised society. For Varda, gleaning is not the
even her first film, the (good) opposite of (bad) waste but a practice that redefines social exchanges. As is often
experimental 1954 La
the case, Varda allows her subject matter to influence her cinematographic narrative
Pointe-Courte, which
was later interpreted as
techniques but she also stops short of proposing a simple equation between the two. To
the forerunner of the begin with, I would like to concentrate not only on the ambiguity of gleaning as an
French New Wave, oppositional practice but also on the imperfect parallel that Varda establishes between
already manifested a fas- gleaning and film-making.
cination for social Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse could have been a straightforward critique of wasting. We
divisions, focusing as it
does on the parallel itin-
have all been taught, very early on, that ‘wasting’ is bad, that throwing out is the result
erary between a couple of poor management, especially where food is concerned. Varda’s film, however, is not
and the fishermen of his a motherly lecture urging her children to eat up their porridge; nor does it purport to
native village, La adapt that individual lesson to a larger industrial scale. Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse does not
Pointe-Courte. Long scold. Instead, the film offers a complex variation on gleaning, and on its obvious or less
before Sans toit ni loi
(1985), L’Opéra-Mouffe
obvious connection with social ills.
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(1958) was already talk- Today, recycling is a recognised label and the word refers to a type of activity that
ing about homelessness we automatically condone and encourage. It is approved of, perhaps even fetishised as a
and poverty. necessary corrective to industrialised countries’ tendency to waste excessively. The
3 Both La Vie rêvée des ideology of recycling is the crossroads where half-hearted attempts to reduce pollution
anges and Rosetta meet more cynical concerns for a business’ image. Varda obviously does not share our
describe the difficulties enthusiasm for conventional recycling. This film prefers to resurrect an old-fashioned
experienced by two
and slightly quaint concept, gleaning, which does not make for a very sexy title. But
young women who
refuse to resign then again, the film is not a triumphant hymn to quick fixes. Nor does it try to paint a
themselves to nostalgic portrait of idyllic nineteenth-century gleaners. Varda’s originality is to avoid
unemployment. La both types of idealisation. Besides, her gleaners are not a homogenous social class and
Promesse focuses on the her documentary presents us with multiple portraits of gleaners, of recyclers, of
plight of illegal
salvagers whose practices are not easily summarised.
immigrants or rather on
the illegal employment Varda is clearly attracted to the messiest and least accepted types of individual
of quasi-slaves by a practices (going through the trash, for example), and her scepticism for the most
white working-class conventional forms of modern recycling is palpable. When she devotes a few scenes to
character. workshops designed to teach children how to sort out domestic waste, the screen is
suddenly saturated with loud, almost garish colours, as if the genre of the film had
changed, as if we were suddenly watching a melodramatic version of Ma vie en rose
(Berliner, 1997), or a pastiche of The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939). Just as it takes
pedagogy to teach new generations how to deal with waste, just as it takes ideology to
encode X as disposable waste and Y as recyclable material, the documentary seems to
be inviting us to sift through apparently random definitions of gleaning, and to let us do
our own sorting.
The omnipresent commentary, however, never pretends to retreat behind
objectivity. It intervenes and voices its biases or opinions: for example, the well-
meaning metamorphosis of plastic bottles or yoghurt containers into sculptures is
observed with an almost schizophrenic dose of respect and irony. In that scene, an
avalanche of green bins and multicoloured cute little plastic objects make recycling
synonymous with cleanliness and order, an equation that the narrative voice simply does
not buy: ‘But have the children ever seen what the sweepers sweep?’ (simultaneously, an
abrupt cut shows us the broom of a street cleaner after the market).
The authorised and official recyclers are just not as interesting to Varda as the
marginal gleaners whom the film lovingly portray as they forage through dirty bins.
They are the people that respectable viewers are more likely to frown upon and/or pity
when they (we) meet them outside the cinema. And as the film demonstrates, the

30 Mireille Rosello
 reasons for recycling are as varied as the forms that recycling takes: living off what
others define as refuse can be an ethical choice, a philosophy, a form of art, and, of
course the consequence of severe poverty.
Varda tenderly observes her gleaners’ complexities and contradictions, instead of
portraying them as the miracle cure to globalised wasting: Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse is a
lucid analysis of waste disguised as technological advance. In the sequences devoted to
the gleaning of potatoes, Varda does research on the several stages that lead the potato
from the field to the consumer, and she discovers that waste occurs not so much as the
result of an error in the system but rather as one of the normal elements of the
production chain. Her story, then, is not so much a critique of waste as the
denunciation of a hypocritical ideology of effectiveness that would argue for more
technologically advanced management of food production in the name of the fight
against poverty: for no sooner are the fields harvested by powerful grubbing machines
that tons and tons of perfectly edible potatoes are eliminated by calibrating conveyor
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belts. Supermarkets, we learn, will only buy rigorously regular and millimetrically
correct potatoes. Educated capitalist consumers may already know about such practices,
but perhaps they had never wondered what happened to disqualified potatoes. Varda
discovers and shares with us the disturbing fact that they are taken back where they
came from, the camera following the trucks that unload mountains of potatoes: they go
to waste in a matter of days.
Gleaning has always existed as a corrective to and a reminder of poverty, and was
made possible by always imperfect harvesting techniques that create latitude, introduce
excess and leftover into the system of food gathering. But our contemporary practices
are different, Varda suggests: we accept waste on an unimaginably large scale not
because of the cracks in the harvesting system but because of the redefinition of what is
acceptable, good, first-rate: potatoes are sorted according to size, a criterion that has
nothing to do with the ultimate goal of the operation. The ‘good’ potato is not the
edible potato but one that will fit into a plastic container to be displayed on the shelf of
a supermarket. After industrial agriculture has grown them so effectively thanks to
chemicals and fertilisers, after the fields have been harvested more thoroughly than they
used to, the abundant crop that could have fed so many more individuals is
conscientiously loaded on to trucks and scientifically thrown out, left to rot in
unmarked fields where very few gleaners can take advantage of this manna.
It takes Varda’s indomitable optimism to add a glimmer of poetic and social hope to
the disaster. The increasingly gloomy atmosphere of the scenes filmed around the heap
of potatoes is temporarily lifted by an episode where Varda takes over as gleaner,
becomes ‘la glaneuse’, and invites the spectator to share the luxurious pleasure of
gleaning images and visions rather than food. It is an interesting moment of
discontinuity where the parallel between the director’s artistic work and the gleaners’
labour is explored. The switch to this different type of gleaning occurs during an
encounter with one of the potato gleaners, who explains that many potatoes are
rejected because they are ‘misshapen’ (difformes). He shows some of them to the camera,
commenting that they look like hearts. Varda immediately intervenes and her intrusion
diverts the narration and the documentary: the gleaners’ story is suddenly interrupted
by an autobiographical sequence filmed with a little hand-held digital camera.
Enchanted by the heart-shaped potatoes, Varda decides to glean them, or rather to glean
images of herself gleaning them: ‘I perilously endeavoured to film, with one hand, the
other hand gleaning heart-shaped potatoes’.
At one level, the reference to Varda’s own (double) gleaning activity comes as no

Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse 31

 surprise since the film constantly makes
allusions or explicit comments to the
parallel between filming and gleaning. In
one particularly humorous scene, Varda
herself poses as a ‘glaneuse’, proudly
carrying ears of wheat on her shoulders,
standing right next to Jules Breton’s
painting La Glaneuse. But she is also
careful to set limits to this type of
(Libre de droits. The Gleaner’s Potatoes. Société identification: the shot is also a joke and
Tamaris) the autobiographer lets us know that her
self-portrait as rural gleaner is a fiction, a
narrative. As the voice-over explains, Varda is happy to swap the ears of wheat for a
camera. In the scene, she actually drops her fake burden.
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But Varda’s point is not that she is a fake gleaner if her real tool is the camera. What
she means is that her type of gleaning responds to a different need and also achieves
something else. For example, when she films her hand collecting the potatoes, she is not
trying to imitate the gesture of urban gleaners. Whenever her hand ‘gleans’, whenever
her other hand films her gesture, what she collects is not food (even if the potatoes are
edible) but images, images that were left behind, images that no one had seen. Varda
plucks images from a reality where others had seen only banalities or ugliness. When
she gleans, the activity is always ludic or esthetic, she does not glean to gather bare
necessities. What her hand gleans is not a potato but the surrealist encounter between
the word heart and a dull potato. After filming ‘les glaneurs’, men and children who
take the potatoes home to eat them, she films ‘la glaneuse’: her hand gleans heart-
shaped potatoes and immediately confers on them an almost mythic status.
And the image of a ‘heart’ found amongst the humble potatoes is eminently
meaningful since Varda, resorting to her usual tactic of mental and narrative associations
(what the critics call her ‘adventurous progression modelled on word games’; Lalanne
1995: 6), uses the heart-shaped potatoes as an inspiration to concoct a brilliant plan.
Her idea is a simple metonymic slippage between the heart formed by the potatoes and
the name of French charity restaurants known as ‘restaus du coeur’. She telephones
them. Informed about the existence and location of gleanable potatoes, the local
‘restaus du coeur’ are able to send a small van and to avail themselves of the opportunity.
And what Varda films on that day is the direct consequence of her gleaning experience,
it could not have occurred if she had not made her film. At the same time, Varda is
acutely aware that she must maintain a distinction between ‘les Glaneurs’ and ‘la
glaneuse’ and her voice-over repeats, like a mantra: ‘I never forget…’ that some people
glean to survive.
The less than perfect symmetry between gleaning and filming is thus announced by
the deceptively repetitive title: there is, after all, a qualitative difference between ‘les
Glaneurs’ (who eat potatoes, who make the system of production and distribution more
effective, less wasteful) and ‘la glaneuse’, who deliberately removes the potatoes from
that logic of recuperation. Instead, she turns them into works of art, watching them
decay, filming their metamorphosis. Varda’s gleaned collection of gleaners is much less
organised and coherent than it pretends to be and the film is even more engaging for its
willingness to resist its own desire for order and overall consistency.
That said, even if we enjoy the less than perfect cohesion of Varda’s documentary,
we may still find it difficult to understand the function of one seemingly disconnected

32 Mireille Rosello
 strand of narrative. For the film also creates an incongruous but thought-provoking web 4 In Varda par Agnès, the
of correspondences between the idea of gleaning and Varda’s fascination for her own author writes about an
unfinished project, Peace
ageing body. In the second part of this article, I would now like to turn to this
and Love, written in
intriguing (apparently) parenthetical subtext. I would like to suggest that while the 1968 in the United
parallel between filming and gleaning is increasingly exposed as asymmetrical, the States: after watching
improbable connection between gleaning and old age, on the other hand, makes more Cléo de 5 à 7 on televi-
and more sense as the film progresses. What at first looks like unnecessary and almost sion, and noticing that
arbitrary authorial intrusions, appears, in retrospect, as directly relevant to the concept the film had been inter-
rupted by more than a
of gleaning, as long as we accept the new definitions proposed in the film. dozen commercial
An entire segment of the documentary focuses on Varda herself, or more exactly on breaks, Varda introduced
her body, on her ageing body. The commentary makes frequent allusions to the fact fake ads into her own
that she is now old, that death is around the corner. Some images are more poignant scenario (Varda 1994:
than others, even if pathos is characteristically eschewed. At first, I had trouble 121).
reconciling those moments when Varda films herself with the general economy of the 5 On the critical and
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film and with the focus on ‘glanage’ and ‘grappillage’ [picking]: remembering that she satirical power of Varda’s
‘loosely episodic and
is interested in interruptions and in their effects on the spectator, I was tempted to
quite digressive
conclude that the passages on (her) death were a series of deliberately unrelated structure’ of the film
vignettes, as if commercial breaks had been inserted into a film, Varda replacing and on its connection
products with a sort of ominous refrain about the fragility of human existence.4 The with what he coins
fact that such images are generated by Varda’s digital camera adds to the feeling that ‘Loiterature,’ see
Chambers 1999: 42–46.
those passages are extraneous, visual footnotes, or paravisual elements.
On the other hand, it is clear that the notion of irrelevance itself is questioned by 6 Editing techniques are
the film’s analysis of waste, excess, re-appropriation and collecting. Just as Sans toit ni loi’s also used to make a sim-
ilar point: Varda does
fragmented structure asked us to compare the idea of digression and Mona’s aimless
not hesitate to insert a
wandering, reducing the distance between (our) respectability and (her) irresponsibility,5 few minutes of what
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse could be an invitation to be more hospitable, more open- could have been wasted
minded, less inclined to thoughtlessly discard supposedly unrelated subject matters. film, a long shot that
Allusions to death and images of decomposition (of rotting potatoes, of crumbling walls, she calls ‘the dance of
the lens cap’: random
and of the narrative) are framed in such a way as to question our assumptions about
images picked up by the
coherence, and Varda’s seemingly parenthetical close-ups on her ageing hands, on her digital camera that she
white hair, are also the equivalent of gleanable filmic material: what we cannot make had forgotten to turn
sense of during a first viewing is like what was not harvested by a grubbing machine. off.
One of Varda’s interviewees, busy collecting potatoes in a portion of the field that
was too wet for the tractor has already explained this differential logic: ‘when the
grubbing machine is in trouble, it’s good for the gleaner’. Not so paradoxically then,
what has nothing to do with gleaning, what does not fit in with the overall logic of the
film, is the gleanable in the film: some leftover that can be picked up by others, by
people who look for something else, either out of necessity or because they derive
pleasure from this quest.6 In the end, the director’s self-reflexivity may influence our
own viewing strategies: the parallel would then be not only between Varda’s techniques
and its object of study but also between the filming strategy and the viewing practice of
collecting and re-using images.
In that context, Les Glaneurs and la glaneuse could be read as a statement, or rather a
reverie on connection between gleaning, filming and the fragility of human life. In one
moving scene, the digital camera films Varda in the process of combing her hair. The
image immediately evokes, and repudiates at the same time, the stereotyped
composition of the woman sitting in front of the dressing cabinet, brushing her hair.
Usually, when this conventional figure appears in a film, the woman is young and
beautiful, and looking at herself in the mirror, with the camera behind her. Her hair is

Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse 33

 7 Commenting on her long and abundant, not grey. More often than not, the viewer is treated as a voyeur who
previous films, critics intrudes upon the privacy of such moments, where the (supposedly natural) female
have already written
body can be admired. In Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, the motif of the woman combing
extensively on Varda’s
feminist interventions
her hair is rewritten in a quietly radical way: Varda chooses to film her own hair, in an
(Flitterman-Lewis 1990, extreme close-up, right at the place where the dyed hair is replaced by grey roots. By so
215–315; Smith 1998, doing, she courageously displays not only the signs of age but also the efforts that she
92–141). She may not regularly makes to hide them. What she reveals is the artifice, and also the always
be the only French
already defeated fight against time. Not only does she film what is normally not shown,
female film-maker not
to shy away from the but she also focuses on what is both covered and what can never quite be completely
word feminism covered.
(Hayward 1993, 258), Her potentially cruel gesture is the exact opposite of all the images of women that
but her brand of pretend to celebrate the magic effects of cosmetic products capable of covering grey hair
feminism is an empow-
or of getting rid of wrinkles. To me, the scene functioned as an ironic textual and visual
ering type of fait
accompli: as Ruth Hottel counterpoint to a familiar advert for a moisturiser where a cracked painting is
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recently notes, Varda miraculously restored to its pristine condition. Thanks to supernatural power of product
puts women in the cen- X, the woman’s face is cleansed of the signs of age that marred her beauty.
tre and acts as if such Interestingly enough, in that advert, the cracks are interpreted as a metaphor for
positioning was an
wrinkles and deemed undesirable. The (computerised) restoration of the painting is
insignificant decision:
‘[she] does more than equated with the recapturing of youth. In other words, the traces of age are confused
work against the domi- with the transformation of the material used to represent the woman: the
nant mode – [she] materialisation of the creative process, which emphasises the fact that the beauty of the
denies its importance … model’s face has been constructed by an artist, is here treated as something that must
In contrast to classical
disappear. As if in one single gesture, the advert declared the equivalent undesirability of
Hollywood film, and
often uncomfortably so the marks of age on a human skin and of the evidence of art in the making of a portrait.
for masculinist viewers, Both (natural) wrinkles and the reminder that artifice and conventions also play a role in
the female characters the construction of beauty become interchangeable. The cracks must disappear,
enjoy a central role in regardless of whether they are correctly interpreted as noise in the system of
the narrative and the
representation, or misinterpreted as lines on a face. Varda, on the other hand, is
males are relegated to
secondary roles, even fascinated by the presence of excess and noise: she shows the hands’ wrinkles, and as she
when the subjects pur- does so, she tells us that she is filming herself, she constantly draws our attention to the
portedly treats a man’s layer of representation.
happiness’ (Hottel 67). And not only does Varda remind us that the camera has a comfortable margin of
latitude in the construction of female beauty (acceptable bodies are the product of
historical conventions that a film-maker can criticise and hopefully modify), but she
goes even further: she questions both the cultural definition of female beauty and the
cultural imperative that makes beauty mandatory in our representational universe.7 This
aesthetic choice is particularly striking when Varda films her own body (the body of an
older woman) as her remarkable representation of age systematically avoids two
prevalent stereotypical conventions. A look at the cover of women’s magazines would
immediately highlight Varda’s originality in this domain: in the majority of cases, in a
visual universe dominated by teenagers passed off as women, mature female bodies are
generally absent, they are not suitable models. But if it becomes crucial to let them
appear (in a magazine designed for that age group for example), then, the re-
appropriation of conventions dictates that old age should be re-encoded as (differently)
beautiful. In Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, Varda deliberately chooses not to equate old age
and beauty. The challenge here is not to represent an aesthetically pleasing mature
woman (the few sophisticated digital images of herself lets the spectator know that it
would not be so difficult after all). She is much more interested in her search for new
visual and narrative grammars of old age.

34 Mireille Rosello
 When Varda films her hand, her shots are either static, as if she was painting a still
life, or filmed from at such close range that the hand is distorted beyond recognition:
the voice-over comments on the images, comparing the I to an animal ‘I am an
unknown animal’. And the word ‘horror’ accompanies the camera’s exploration of this
dehumanised flesh. The resulting shots are a fascinating mixture of self-centredness and
anti-narcissism. The body is revealed but not unveiled and the director’s gaze has
nothing to do with the grammar of stripping where the spectator is rewarded with a
glimpse of what is normally hidden and coveted, coveted because hidden. Body parts
are isolated and scrutinised but the result is the exact opposite of the predatory
fragmentation characteristic of a fetishising masculinist gaze.
And just as the camera refuses to ‘recuperate’ old age as a non-conformist form of
beauty, the film also insists on the other side of the paradoxical coin. Not everything
can be salvaged, reused, turned into beauty, from which we should not infer that what
is eliminated cannot be treated with as much respect as what is kept: both what is kept
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and what is eliminated are treated as ‘a universe of possibilities’ (Pons’s phrase) i.e. the
raw material of art, what one could call the Muse in an other metaphorical paradigm. It
is an inherent part of the process that the film makes visible by privileging the idea of
time and stages at the expense of the finished product. Here, Varda goes beyond the
opposition between creator and creating: when filming a work of art, the documentary
suggests, film-makers should not only include the artist (a problematic explored in Jane
B. by Agnès V.), but also the raw material that inspired the creator. One of the lessons
learned through observing gleaners is that the ‘tas de saloperies’ [rubbish] out of which
art may emerge is comparable to the long and messy creative cycle: this process includes
a stage during which some discarded objects are salvaged, kept, reinserted into the
work, or thrown out for other gleaners. The idea is not to put the objects back into
circulation to avoid wasting (Varda will never consume the heart-shaped potatoes that
she takes home), but to give them a new identity, a new role and function.
The artist must accept the value of the wasting process, and, simultaneously, the
artist is a gleaner. Gleaning allows Varda to concentrate on what is supposed to be
thrown out (she films her rotting potatoes), and to embrace, rather than to fight, signs
of decay that others would ruthlessly eliminate. But her attention to the traces of her
wasted labour goes beyond the universe of art: it also brings to mind a classic feminist
intertext. At the beginning of the last century, when women were more likely to be
housewives than ‘glaneuses’, Simone de Beauvoir had pointed out that they were often
put in a situation that forced them to erase the traces of their labour: as long as
housewives were expected to take pride in a perfectly clean house, a well-cooked meal,
their intervention (including the creative process that Varda focuses on) had to remain
transparent. Worse still, their work was defined as a futile fight against decay and the
disorder that it creates: ‘provisions attract rats, they become wormy; moths attack
blankets and clothing. The world is not a dream carved in stone, it is made of dubious
stuff subject to rot…’ (Beauvoir 1974: 508). Women were reduced to fight against time
rather than encouraged to film it, to glean it. Varda, on the contrary, films her rotting
potatoes with glee. The carefully prepared family meal has been replaced by a feast of
images, which, on top of being inedible, would probably have been thrown out by
others.
In Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse she invents a season, a moment that we could call ‘the
season of gleaning’ and which establishes a powerful – albeit untold connection,
between death and gleaning. Just as we can see Sans toit ni loi as a story about winter,
about the cold, so Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse is a film about a season that does not exist,

Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse 35

 an after-season. When the land has produced its fruit, a moment of dormancy begins, a
hiatus, or in-betweenness. Grapes and apples have been picked, the wheat has been
harvested, and between the end of that process and the beginning of a new stage of
preparation, Varda inserts her story. This intermission does not seem particularly well
suited to the beginning of a narrative. The end of the harvest is the anticlimax by
excellence, a rather sad and sobering junction.
The originality of Varda’s film is to refuse two conventions: the melancholic
contemplation of our human and societal limits (the imminent desolation of winter and
death, the scandalous mismanagement of waste), and the triumphant leap of faith that
would allow us to project ourselves into the next spring, with its heroic celebration of
future harvests. The season of gleaning is not an obvious allegory of old age. And
gleaning is not a panacea. But it is a rich if ambiguous hermeneutic model that gives
viewers an original margin of latitude: the film leaves us free to make decisions about
what constitutes waste and about what is valuable, because the distinction requires a
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conscious gesture of interpretation. Depending on how you film the harvested field,
you will either see nothingness or abundance. Either nothing is left, it is the end. Or it
is the beginning of the gleaning season.

References
Beauvoir, S. (de) (1974), The Second Sex, Trans. H.M. Parshley, New York, Vintage
Books.
Chambers, R. (1999), Loiterature, Lincoln, Nebraska University Press.
Flitterman-Lewis, S. (1990), To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema,
Urbana and Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Hayward, S. (1993), French National Cinema. New York and London, Routledge.
Hottel, R. (1999), ‘Including Ourselves: The Role of Female Spectators in Agnès
Varda’s Le bonheur and L’une chante, l’autre pas’, Cinema Journal, 38: 2, pp. 52–72.
Lalanne, J-M. (1995), ‘Le Demy Monde’, Cahiers du cinéma, 495, p.6.
Smith, A. (1998), Agnès Varda, Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Varda, A. (1994), Varda par Agnès, Paris, Editions Cahiers du Cinéma and Ciné-
Tamaris.

36 Mireille Rosello