Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000) is one of those rare films that slides, so smoothly into place, a new filter through which to see and think about cinema. Her documentary-essay doesn’t just explore and investigate the act of gleaning—she offers up gleaning as a metaphor for filming itself . . . and for reconsidering how we watch film.

Film is a recycling art-form. It reuses and remixes; the mainstream’s reworking and rebooting of genres, subgenres, franchises, and individual films is constant. (Take the regular franchise reboots in the current comic-book movie-adaptation craze. Long, long ago and far, far away, in a pre-MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe] Hollywood, Phase 3 [1998-2007, from Blade to Spider-Man 3] of superhero-blockbusters couldn’t have ka-pow!ed and whooshed its way on screen so successfully without CGI, starting in the ’70s [Phase 1: 1978-86, or Superman to Howard the Duck] and continuing in the ’90s, when it went from Gotham neo-noir to the DC’s campy crusader [Phase 2: 1989-97, or Batman to Batman & Robin].)

And in going beyond genre-remixing, making reworking, recycling, and reusing its main motifs and concerns, Varda’s documentary suggests that film, when it filters and projects our memories, can be a gleaner itself. Taking inspiration from such works as Jean-François Millet’s painting Des glaneuses—which reminds us that, for centuries in Europe, women did the gleaning—Varda sifts through memories and picks through

archives, art, and life like a glaneuse—a picker of leftover produce or discarded objects—gathering little images in the basket of her film. Varda shows art made from found objects as the film itself becomes an arrangement of found moments and recollected, reworked memories and ideas. Through the glass-eye of the camera lens—usually a handy digital video-camera—she picks out images. As she riffles through dictionary, artistic, social, cultural, and legal definitions of “gleaning”, Varda picks out gypsies gleaning potatoes for their dinner in their caravan park, or an artist poking through curbside waste for material for his works, or a lawyer (whom she places in a cabbage field) outlining France’s law about gleaning.

It’s the video-essay as a restless foraging for and sifting through ideas, where manual, agricultural traditions are recovered and renewed by artists in an industrial, technological age. Its digital-video medium, too, as critic Jake Wilson notes, “seem[s] like a democratic gesture in itself, a way of reducing the distance between Varda and the people she films – not only because video technology is less cumbersome and intimidating, but because the drabness of video tends to demystify the relationship between the filmmaker and his or her raw material.” It is, as critic Owen Gleiberman puts it, “thrift-shop” cinema.

The film’s humility is in keeping with the first written mentions of gleaning, in the Bible, where Leviticus preaches that the leftover fruits of field labour should be left for the poor and for strangers, while Deuteronomy says they should be left for strangers, orphans, and widows. “Documentaries are a discipline that teaches modesty,” Varda remarks in her production notes, and the images of stooping in many paintings of gleaning connote, with people crouched so close to earth and nature’s dregs, a sense of humility and basic dignity. But there’s also, in Varda’s hands, a sense of play. She plays with language (“gleaners have a field day”) and visual language (superimposition, slowing time, close-ups), her whimsy leading her to wonder, “Where does play end and art start?” In a car on the highway, she forms a round, eye-like frame with her hand, as if extending her camera-like eye, and so captures trucks passing by; when the lens cap on her DV camera swings along in an impromptu shot, she leaves that moment in the film

and sets music to it, calling the sequence “The Dance of the Lens Cap.” And the digital-video form seems to emphasize the local and immediate all the more, allowing for more free-and-easy conversational interviews but more personal reflection, too—a diary-like feel. There’s a jaunty, relaxed mood, with Varda seeming quite open to coincidence, serendipity, and the luck of the draw.

This mix of candour with intimacy, of controlled play with a restless, searching spirit of inquiry, has seeped through the work of two fiction-feature directors whose careers took off around the same time as Varda’s documentary appeared. Both, in their cheeky, outsider-ish ways, boisterously remix and recycle, offering quaint settings, artist-bohemian characters and plenty of odds and ends in their salvage-culture pictures.

In the oeuvre of Wes Anderson, salvage-culture nestles cozily into nooks and crannies of the director’s playhouse as he toys with the pieces of a retro-cool past. Looking back, his third film, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), seems like the boho-brownstone bedrock of his work. (The Criterion Collection edition of the film includes a thick booklet with floor plans and drawings of the rooms in the Tenenbaum house.) Anderson’s films always seem to be looking back, at a past or past-like present—in this case, at a Salinger-esque New York City replete with dictaphones, tattered ’80s dustjackets, two-dial TV sets, beaten-up Gypsy Co. cabs, a packed closet of board games, push-button intercoms, pup tents, and secretaries, advisors, elevator-operators, and manservants. And they’re looking back at mirrors (how the cast is introduced) or staring at painting frames or voiceover-narrating storybook pages to us, as every shot seems to take us into another little dollhouse-room—even the cemetery sequence in The Royal Tenenbaums is divvied up into discrete plots.

That tension between the meticulousness of his films’ look, so maturely sectioned-off and storyboarded, and his stories’ raucous sense of near-absurd child’s play (heists, a war of reprisal, a submarine mission, a wilderness trek, a battle between farmers and foxes, grandiose drama-productions, children running away together amid a hurricane and flood, the quest to prove a bellhop’s innocence during wartime) animates Anderson’s work. His fastidious framing and set-design pair up primly with his interest in cloistered, comically self-serious, faintly-British eccentrics; sober, Kubrick-like visual compositions vie with wry, Wodehouse-like literary larks. The 2013 volume The Wes Anderson Collection is as much a compendium of scenes from Anderson’s films as a collection of his influences: he’s reworked and remixed moments, moods, and storylines from films by Hal Ashby, Alfred Hitchcock, Ken Loach, Mike Nichols, François Truffaut, and more. Unsurprisingly, Citizen Kane, collecting memories and mementos of its title-character, is a major influence (that cast introduction at the start of The Royal Tenenbaums, for instance, mirrors the postage stamp-framed roll-call of dramatis personae in Welles’ film). The part-diorama, part-dollhouse look of Anderson’s multi-film universe seems to echo the prismatic snowglobe-world of Welles’ magnum opus. (Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, too, echoes Citizen Kane in its shot of Cléo — like Kane, reflected in a hall of mirrors in his vast mansion just after his wife has left him — reflected endlessly in a mirror just after she has left a dire tarot-card reading.)

The writer-director’s work, ever aware of itself as a carefully constructed, multi-storied film, can occasionally come off as too hermetically sealed, too navel-gazing (that’s why The Life Aquatic sinks). And that may be why Gene Hackman’s patriarch Royal—a stuck-in-the-’70s, edging-on-racist, insensitive, gruff wise guy, who says “Let’s shag ass” or “I’m lovin’ every minute with this damn crew”—so saltily spikes the punch in The Royal Tenenbaums. Of course, he’s still an Anderson character—what other type would declare, “You’re taking my encyclopædias.* This is humiliating.” (*Indubitably, Anderson’s preferred spelling.) But he’s also a conniving, cantankerous, bit-of-a-bastard thrill amid a slumping throng of post-precocious kidults and stunted middle-agers, lugging around their emotional hang-ups, baggage, and dysfunctions.

The near-fantastic, offbeat, play-room sensibility of Anderson’s work is much of his appeal—we feel as if we’ve moved in with this family for a time and the rest of the world melts away. That cozy-roominess slots in snugly with the various cornered resentments, stacked secrets, and crammed cubbyholes of bad memories. The Royal Tenenbaums, holding up a mirror from the start, is a strangely comforting, only-slightly-

distorted reflection of the quirky little messes that so many of our own families are. And Anderson’s play with form culminates over a decade later, in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), where three different aspect ratios are used for three different periods—in that quintessentially Anderson-esque move, film-space and story-time are joyously married.

Although his filmography’s spottier than Anderson’s, French director Michael Gondry has been more eclectic and wildly inventive in his retro-stylized films, which often seem like a combination of contraption and confection—tricksy and trap-like or charming and sweet by turns. Remixing romance, sci-fi, comedy, and drama, the wondrously wistful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), directed by Gondry and written by Charlie Kaufman, sees Joel (Jim Carrey) undergo memory-erasure to forget his relationship with Clementine (Kate Winslet). Amid this mélangeof French ennui, American quirk, and brittle, quasi-English humour—and especially with our entries into the alcoves and recesses of Joel’s mind, shot with a grainy, gritty, DV-like realism—there’s the machine itself: a large metal dome around Joel’s head, a tangle of wires connecting it to a keyboard and a cathode ray tube, TV-like screen. Gondry would

go on, as YouTube was taking off in an increasingly cut-and-paste, portable-PC world, to make Be Kind Rewind (2008), where a scrapyard owner and his buddy—in a move reminiscent of Varda’s use of DV for an on-the-spot, local, block-party feel—start “sweding” Hollywood flicks by remaking shorter versions of them on the cheap. They move on by rewinding: the neighbourhood comes together to shoot a film about Fats Waller, a great figure in the world of jazz, that musical form known for its recombining and improvisations. Even in Gondry’s coming-of-age buddy-picture Microbe & Gasoline (2015), two French boys rev their trippy little motorized way down the road in a little mobile home they cobble together out of lumber and scrapped parts.

But it may be Gondry’s first writer-director feature all his own, a phantasmagoria of dream and surrealism, The Science of Sleep (2006)—like watching Lewis Carroll and Luis Buñuel duke it out in a somnambulist boxing-match in Paris—that’s his prototypical work. A collage of jilted romance, Freudian slaps, and that jerky, so-close-to-real feel of night-time reveries, the story teeter-totters between inspired fantasy sequence and the needy, messy moments of real life, with illustrator Stéphane Miroux (Gael García Bernal) a tangle of creativity, insecurity, childishness, and stifled grief. Trash-compacting animation, magic-realism, realism, and oddity into a near-cubist portrait of this artist’s roiling psyche, it tinkers and toys more than any of the director’s other patchworks (Gondry got his start in music videos) with whispery special effects, recycled objects, and surreal backdrops. (It also criss-crosses tongues: Stéphane, returned from Mexico to Paris, speaks Spanish, French, and English.) As it threads us along the darker seam in its pillowy plot, Stéphane’s revealed as a boy-man who can never quite grow up; he’s mercurial, even volatile, and his desire for neighbour Stéphanie—the name suggesting she’s a shadow-self—seems as much a desire for a mother-figure as for a lover. In the opening scene, before cardboard-box cameras, he puts paint and pasta in a pot, producing a puff of pink smoke, and then we’re whisked into a credit-sequence where the backdrops

are canvases on which globs and gobs of paints swirl around or slowly shatter out. (In Gondry’s teeming bric-a-brac bricolage: Paris becomes papier-mâché as Stéphane flies over it in a dream; home-video memories unspool on a back-wall frame in his cardboard TV studio; water flows like crinkly cellophane from a tap; Stéphane dictates to a giant, self-operating typewriter; embroidered creatures dance on a quilt as Stéphane packs up felt objects. There are also gizmos, gadgets, models, dioramas, and mini-movie sets.)

Stéphane’s subconscious is a jumble of contradictions, conflicting emotions, and hang-ups. (His creativity’s both cathartic and ruinous, releasing his frustrations and keeping him too inward-looking.) If such inventiveness seems to be a reflection, too, of the film-space as an auteur’s cluttered mental-attic, a vast canvas on which his dreams and visions are being splatter-painted, then The Science of Sleep suggests that it can be a shadowy, formidable head-space, too, especially if an artist gets carried away, snarled up in his own neuroses and obsessions. But there’s also, hidden away in Gondry’s film about one man’s psychic debris—as when Stéphane’s boss dumps his television in a river,

saying, “TV’s garbage anyways”—and Varda’s documentary about gathering—where we see TVs broken up for their copper, prompting us to recall that out-moded cameras, too, are consigned to the scrap-heap—a warning about what we leave behind and what lies beneath our culture’s ever-growing, teetering pile of films.

The lowliness of Varda’s technique and subject seems at odds with the high-tech ways we watch films these days. Yet is there real waste in that? Yep. The immaterial, it turns out, is still pretty reliant on the material. Just because we stream films on our laptops or watch video on our phones, that doesn’t mean we’re not leaving an eco- footprint. Until recently, your film-screening device was pretty much guaranteed to contain coltan (columbite-tantalite), a mineral extracted in the Congo, often by children; the coltan-mining industry’s helped finance a civil war that’s left seven million dead, hundreds of thousands wounded or maimed, and thousands raped. And after we’re done with our electronics—whither goest those curved-screen TVs, bulky desktop computers, or first-generation iPods? Many are bound for India or China, to be dismantled, smelted, dumped, and otherwise turned into effluent, fumes, and rusting, non-biodegradable parts which can only mar those people’s health and scar their environment.

So what can we glean from all this, beyond the insanity of, say, watching on our gadgets and gizmos an eco-parable like Avatar ushering in another wave of 3D or flat-screen or computer-generated technology, and more and more coltan and other non-renewable resources, into the circuit-boards and battery packs of our electronic lives? (And what of film-productions’ eco-footprints? Shoots and sets never seem to get environmental audits.) The medium’s the message, it seems—we have to reconsider, as Varda has us reconsider what’s scrapped and what’s gleaned, how we watch film and what we watch it on, not to mention what our films are about. If we have to do that on the very machines that are part of the problem in order to figure out a solution, so be it for now. Someone else’s play-on-film doesn’t mean our work, as critical viewers and consumers, ends. If we can start rethinking and reworking our own ideas about how we consume film, maybe more and more of us will move beyond hypocrisy and into re-action.

Works Cited

Be Kind Rewind. Directed by Michel Gondry, New Line, 2008.

Cléo de 5 à 7. Directed by Agnès Varda, Ciné Tamaris, 1962.  

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Directed by Michel Gondry, Focus, 2004.

The Gleaners and I [Les glaneurs et la glaneuse]. Directed by Agnès Varda, Ciné Tamaris, 2000.

Gleiberman, Owen. “Film Review: ‘Faces Places’ (Visages Villages).” Variety, 26 May 2017, https://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/visages-villages-review-agnes-varda-1202444461/.

The Grand Budapest Hotel. Directed by Wes Anderson, Fox Searchlight, 2014.

Microbe & Gasoline [Microbe & Gasoil]. Directed by Michel Gondry, StudioCanal, 2015.

The Royal Tenenbaums. Directed by Wes Anderson, Touchstone, 2001.

The Science of Sleep [La science des rêves]. Directed by Michel Gondry, Warner Independent, 2006.

Seitz, Matt Zoller. The Wes Anderson Collection. Abrams, 2013.

Wilson, Jake. “Trash and Treasure: The Gleaners and I.” Senses of Cinema, issue 23, December 2002, http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/gleaners/.

The author, a professor of film studies, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All film stills are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.