A Film Canon

This remarkable travelogue-documentary examines the fate of economic, recreational and aesthetic gleaning in the wake of digitally mechanized agriculture. At the same time, it's an exploration of the possibilities of the portable digital camera. Varda understands the digicam as a return to the earliest, impressionist 'cinema of attraction', peculiarly attuned to visual waste and redundancy. The connection is poetically made in her interview with a landowner - the only one across the course of the documentary who actively promotes and fosters gleaning - who identifies a building on his estate as the birthplace of cinema itself, the site where his great-grandfather Etienne-Jules Marey experimented with the first chronophotographic images. At the same time, Varda presents this impressionist aesthetic as a new take on auteurism, as her proximity to the filming apparatus obliterates the distance between conception and execution. Large portions of the film give the impression of taking place in real time, while editing feels as if it is done in camera, only moments away from the images it arranges. It also breaks down the distinction between Varda's body and that of the camera - "this is my project - to film one hand with the other" - producing an extraordinarily tactile renewal of the camera-stylo, and proximity to the "rot, leftover, waste, mould and trash" that forms the subject of the film. At times, Varda's body actually becomes an extension of camera technique, as when she uses her hands as an irising device, creating a loving counterpoint to the austere industrial-agricultural backdrops, which at times recall the blankness of the New Topographers. In this way, Varda gestures towards youtube and other imminent mass modes of digital sharing and gleaning as one example of the syntax of waste that preoccupies the last part of the film. The result is a magical revitalisation of refuse as relics that culminates with the object that 'finds' Varda, an amateur combination of the iconic paintings of gleaners that structure her vision: "...no movie trick, the painting had beckoned to us because it belonged in the film."