#67 (tie): ‘The Gleaners and I’: The Reveal discusses all 100 of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time

Agnès Varda's 2000 documentary unforgettably examines the practice of picking up what others have discarded in all its forms.

On December 1st, 2022, Sight & Sound magazine published “The Greatest Films of All Time,” a poll that’s been updated every 10 years since Bicycle Thieves topped the list in 1952. It is the closest thing movies have to a canon, with each edition reflecting the evolving taste of critics and changes in the culture at large. It’s also a nice checklist of essential cinema. Over the course of many weeks, months, and (likely) years, we’re running through the ranked list in reverse order and digging into the films as deep as we can. We hope you will take this journey with us.

The Gleaners and I
Dir. Agnès Varda
Ranking: #67 (tie)
Previous rankings: N/A.

Premise: The word “gleaners” refers traditionally to people who scavenge the countryside after a harvest, picking up crops that had been left behind. Inspired by an 1867 painting by Jean-Francois Millet depicting women in aprons, stooping for stalks of wheat, director Agnès Varda use the Millet painting as a jumping-off point for a personal reflection on gleaners of all kinds, from scavengers of odd-shaped potatoes and storm-dislodged oysters to artists who make meaningful use of recycled materials. She also shines a light on poor communities and citizens who cobble together their diets and their homes from societal rubbish. 

Scott: Here’s where I get to brag a little, Keith—if also confessing to your age can be considered a form of bragging. The first time I attended The Toronto Film Festival was the year 2000, when The A.V. Club was so thoroughly off the map that I was denied credentials to attend the festival as a member of the press. (The next year, I’d graduate to a byzantine “voucher” system before graduating to a badge in 2002.) There are many hassles that went along with my public status—a lot of hours in rush lines to get front-row seats—but the filmmakers were almost always present for public screenings at TIFF and it could lead to special moments, like Agnès Varda and a team of volunteers passing out edible garbage at the screening of her new documentary The Gleaners and I. I can’t recall exactly what food was on offer—I seem to believe it was a Twinkle-like pastry treat still in its plastic wrapping, but I’ll confess to passing on it—but I do recall the audience being absolutely delighted by Varda and her film. 

No director has had a more seismic poll-to-poll shift in his or her director than Varda, who has two films in the 2022 Top 100 (this and Cléo From 5 to 7, which is all the way up at #14) and one (Vagabond) just outside it, after being completely absent in all previous iterations of the poll. Part of this is an overdue adjustment in the voting pool, which opened up to many more women critics in 2022 than in other years, but much is owed to Varda’s late-in-life second act as a first-person documentarian/essayist and a cult of personality in the cinephile world. That started with The Gleaners and I, and I can say that I was there to witness it, like seeing Nirvana at a small club before Nevermind came out. (It’s an imperfect analogy, because Nirvana only had the Bleach LP and Varda was part of the French New Wave, but you get it.) Varda had become someone not just to appreciate or reconsider, but the reigning icon for women in film. And we’ve got the t-shirts to prove it. 

The Gleaners and I is also an incredibly important film in the history of digital filmmaking, which is another good reason to include it on the Sight & Sound list. The promise of cheap, handheld, high-quality digital cameras was the democratization of the medium, so artists would not have to worry about the traditional gatekeepers that might keep them realizing their vision. As Francis Ford Coppola famously said in Hearts of Darkness, “Suddenly one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father’s little camera-corder, and for once this whole professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever and it will become an art form.” That promise has been complicated and compromised in a thousand different ways, but it’s funny to consider that Coppola’s imagined “fat girl in Ohio” turned out to be a septuagenarian Frenchwoman who delighted at the chance to pick up a camera and make a film that taps so directly into her curiosity and artistic impulses. 

Not that Varda ever asked for permission. Her first feature, 1955’s La Pointe Courte, was made for $14,000 with a cast and crew who worked for free, and she didn’t come into it with any previous production experience, outside of her work as a still photographer. Early in The Gleaners and I, she’s thrilled to demonstrate the ease with which she can hold the camera in one hand and a heart-shaped potato in the other, and she even spends a minute fiddling with some of the in-camera effects. As someone who’s generally hostile to digital filmmaking, even I cannot help but be charmed by that, in part because Varda is utilizing this technology or what it is—not a replacement for celluloid, but as a tool for cheap, nimble, wholly personal projects. 

With The Gleaners and I, Varda locks into a wonderfully elastic metaphor for “scavengers” of all kinds, from the most literal gleaners who pick up after a harvest to the urban poor who rummage through waste for perfectly edible food to the artists who recycle and reassemble work out of discarded parts. From the beginning, Varda sees herself in the gleaners of Jean-Francois Millet’s painting, which I happened to gawk at extensively last year at the Musée de Orsay in Paris during a family trip. At the time, Millet’s painting, with its sympathetic portrait of poor women in the fields, upset the middle- and upper-class when it was unveiled at the Salon in 1857, suggesting its alignment with the socialist movement. And there’s no doubt that Varda carries that spirit into the dawn of the 21st century, where she celebrates the hidden underclass that picks through the scraps of a wasteful, indulgent, unjust society. 

But before I pick up the little gems The Gleaners and I leaves behind, let’s hear from you, Keith. When did Agnès Varda start to appear on your radar? What do you make of the cult of Varda? And how has this brief, seemingly modest documentary found itself in the company of Andrei Rublev, The Red Shoes, and other heavy-hitters on the Sight & Sound 2022 list?

Keith: Varda wasn’t a new name to me when The Gleaners and I appeared. As a cinephile trying to further my education/video store employee who could rent movies for free, I dutifully watched (and loved) Cléo from 5 to 7 as part of my self-directed survey of the French New Wave. But you’re right to talk about the 21st century emergence of the Varda cult, which has been fueled both by a rediscovery of her past work and the years Varda spent working tirelessly until her death in 2019 at the age of 90—making films, working as an installation artist, and touring the world. For a while, Varda was like a traveling attraction. I was lucky enough to see her in person twice, both with this film at the Wisconsin Film Festival (sadly, we did not get garbage food) and at a screening of Cléo at the Music Box in Chicago. I guess I’m part of that cult. At the very least, I was thrilled to see The Gleaners and I make this list. That’s in part because I wasn’t expecting it. I love the movie, and you’re right to frame it as an historically important film, but it’s such a determinedly modest film, at least on the surface. It’s easy to see it getting overlooked.

That’s just on the surface, though. Varda’s such an amiable, entertaining host in her documentaries that it’s easy to overlook how ingeniously constructed they are. Everything in The Gleaners and I fits together to create a layered film about the subject of gleaning. It functions as a work of social observation (and quiet protest) of a society in which overabundance and deprivation live side by side; an exploration of the many sorts of gleaners, from those who gather what’s been discarded in order to survive to those who see it as a protest against waste to artists who use detritus as materials; a consideration of the creative process; and a piece of autobiography.

It works incredibly well yet it could easily have seemed tone deaf to place reflective musings and serious political issues side-by-side. We could try to pick apart why it works, but it may just boil down to Varda being incredibly good at what she did. Maybe there was a kind of grand design to the film, but it seems intuitive, the work of someone who saw associations she knew how to string together. Either way, it feels of a piece with Varda’s other documentaries, both those that followed and earlier films like Daguerréotypes, the film she made about her neighbors when caring for a young child kept her from traveling too far, and Uncle Yanco, in which she meets a long lost relative in America.

It’s easy to get caught up in the Vardaness of The Gleaners and I at the expense of her other subjects, but she is central to its design. The French title translates as The Gleaners and the Gleaneress, which might be more accurate since Varda’s own scavenging approach to art certainly gets plenty of time. (Later her art installations would include sheds constructed from prints of her own film.) I can’t speak to the accuracy, but the sense you get from watching the movie is of a filmmaker wandering around and filming whatever she finds that fits within the framework of her subject—one happy accident after another. 

But she’s a gleaner in another sense, too. When I interviewed Carrie Rickey about her Varda biography A Complicated Passion, we talked a bit about how when her contemporaries were lamenting the death of film, Varda embraced the new digital filmmaking tools, flaws and all. She shot The Gleaners and I using cutting edge technology that was also cheap and kind of crappy. Varda always had a hard time getting her films financed and a five-year gap separates Gleaners from her previous film, The World of Jacques Demy (one of several tributes she made to her husband and his work), and six years since her previous major feature, One Hundred and One Nights, a whimsical celebration of movies that died a death at the box office. Digital filmmaking offered a way around that. She could grab and go and not worry too much about the business. If her peers turned their noses up at this new way of making movies, she’d pick it out of the garbage and make it her own.

I want to turn this over to you to talk about some of the non-Varda subjects, but before doing that I want to bring up one of the gleaners who’s stuck with me: Alain, a Parisian with a master’s degree who lives off of what he gathers from markets and spends his night teaching French to immigrants. He’s an eccentric, for sure, but maybe he’s also living a more selfless, enlightened existence than most would dare. Varda doesn’t cast judgment or reveal her feelings either way, about him or her other subjects.

He stuck with me. Who stuck with you, Scott? And what do you make of Varda’s presence in the film? (In the short 2002 sequel The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, one of her viewers explicitly calls her out for being too great a presence in her own film. I don’t agree with that point of view, but it’s worth discussing.)

Scott: Alain is most definitely a standout character, for us and for Varda, who makes him the last subject of the film. And I honestly think she does cast judgment in her alignment with a principled person like Alain and her obvious interest in/sympathy for the underclass scavengers that society largely ignores. (On the other hand, I don’t think the grocer who bleaches his garbage to keep young vandals from rifling through it comes off well, though Varda does seem interested in the judge who applies the law to them.) What separates Alain from the other people in The Gleaners and I is that he doesn’t have to live as he does, given his education (he has a masters degree in biology), and he certainly isn’t required to live in a migrant house and teach literacy classes to immigrants from Mali and Senegal. He has discovered that getting to Paris at 5:45 a.m. will get him all the apples he needs along with good bread from bakeries have tossed from the day before. He likes to gnaw on parsley because of its nutritious value and seems to have a sense of what he needs to be healthy. Beyond that, he clearly enjoys living among migrants and helping them find their way in France, and Varda loves him for it. 

But the character that’s burned in my brain is a thin-haired middle-aged “hobo” living in a trailer out in the country, where he and his partner survive without electricity and with an outdoor water tap that would freeze up in the winter without jury-rigged insulation. He talked about once working impossible hours as a trucker until the day a cop pulled him over and checked his breath, which took him off that job forever. His wife left with their three kids to a town 500 miles away and he’s cut off from them completely, due to his alcoholism and obvious lack of fitness as a father. He panhandles and rummages through the trash, but even this marginalization—much owed to his own mistakes, of course—is under threat from a mayor who wants itinerants to leave the trailers. Where does this guy go from here? And if Varda didn’t take an interest in him, who would even care? I was reminded of Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, so on-the-margins that society seems poised to simply wipe them off the map. 

Did you happen to see the excellent Varda parody, “Trouver Frisson,” on the fourth season of Documentary Now! last year? Absolutely hilarious and typically dead-on, as usual, to the point where I was expecting a scene in The Gleaners and I that never arrived. In the parody, the Varda-like director/narrator admires the mold growing on her walls but is disheartened to learn from a professional that this beautiful abstract art was a terrible threat to her health. (“The skin is the wallpaper of the body and the wallpaper is the skin of the wall,” says fake-Varda.) That never happens in The Gleaners and I, in which Varda seems content with the leaking water and expanding black spot on her ceiling. She likes to live humbly and hand-to-mouth, it seems, and we even see her furnishing her place with a couple of chairs she found abandoned on the street. 

The spontaneous, seemingly intuitive form of The Gleaners and I allows for so much interesting play on the margins, like Varda remembering family trips where she’d gawk at the trucks they’d pass (and would pass them) on the highway. Here she offers a whole montage of her circled hand in front of the camera, “crushing” the trucks as they come into view, and she’s hired a couple of characters to dress up in costumes to read the Penal Code when determining if and how gleaning is allowed under certain circumstances. It’s silly but also so disarming, like the audience has this eccentric tour guide who’s going to surprise you with her personality. People seem very willing to talk to her for this movie and I think you can see why. She’s curious and ingratiating. 

She’s also old. Or at least she tells herself that. “My hair and hands keep telling me the end is near,” she says at one point, likening the old food that her subjects acquire to her own expiration date. How delightful to know now that she would have almost 20 more years to live! But death is not far from her mind throughout The Gleaners and I, which builds to a moment where she cuts to a close-up of her hand and says this: “That’s what this project is about: Filming one hand with the other. To enter into the horror of it. I find it extraordinary. I feel like some kind of animal. Even worse, an animal I don’t know.” That’s the thing about The Gleaners and I and other Varda docs: They’re driven by curiosity, not presupposition, even when she’s thinking about her own mortality. She wants to be surprised by what she finds. 

What other tidbits did you scrounge up with this movie, Keith? Are there connections you can make between this film and her subsequent projects? And as a photography enthusiast, have you attempted the dance of the lens cap?

Keith: As someone who frequently forgets to remove a lens cap, I’m grateful for any reminder that the pros have issues too. As for connections, one obvious connection is what you’ve been talking about: Varda’s house on the Rue Daguerre where Varda— and, a bit later, Demy—lived from the 1950s until her death. It’s the same cat-friendly home you see in Daugerrotypes and in the documentaries that followed The Gleaners and I. The interest in marginal lives traces back to at least the great 1985 film Vagabond. But I think the strongest connection between Gleaners and the rest of Varda’s filmography is between it and those later films. This seemingly loose, catch-as-catch-can approach to filmmaking would inform films like Faces Places and The Beaches of Agnes. In some ways, Gleaners plays like a reintroduction. This is the on-screen persona she’d adopt and that a new wave of fans would get to know.

It’s also the persona—and by using that term I don’t mean to suggest the Varda we see on screen is radically different from the Varda one might meet off screen—that would allow her to be such a successful interviewer. Who wouldn’t open up to her? That’s also another way technology helped. I forget where I saw the quote—probably in Rickey’s book—but Varda talked about how the lightweight camera she could hold in her hand helped erase the distance between herself and her subject. Who needs a fancy Errol Morris Interrotron when you have a consumer-grade Sony? (In confirming it was a Son,y I found a neat tweet of Varda-and-her-cameras-over-the-years photos.)

Getting back to the subject of the film, I’d describe this as one of those movies that changed the way I see the world. It made me acutely aware of everyday waste and inequality. I often think about those potatoes deemed too big or misshapen that would have just lain in the fields if someone had not known where and when to retrieve them. (A side note: When Varda died, fans left potatoes outside her house. Presumably some of them were heart shaped.) I’d be lying if I said the film caused me to radically rethink my own habits. I’d probably suffer an imaginary ailment if I ever ate yogurt past its expiration date. But it gave a reality and put a bunch of unforgettable human faces to an issue that had previously been abstract.

So let me ask you this: Does it work as a piece of activism? In The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, we see Varda making a television appearance with Francois L., one of the subjects of Gleaners, who’s had a rough couple of years but also used them to continue discussing his habits and their wider implications. Varda’s work always had a political component to one degree or another. Is this effective in that way?

Scott: I almost think you answered your own question when you ask if The Gleaners and I works as a piece of activism. If you can describe it as “one of those movies that changed the way I see the word,” then I’m not sure how much more evidence we need than that, even if you’re still keeping too close an eye on expiration dates. (Back when she was at Vox, our friend Alissa Wilkinson, now a critic for The New York Times, wrote a big, persuasive piece on the subject that puts her firmly in Varda’s corner on this issue.) Talking about whether films work as activism or not is a tricky question, because it’s hard to apply any kind of standard of measure to it. Criticizing something like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 for failing to stop George W. Bush re-election bid—as perhaps the drunk Cannes jury that gave it the Palme D’Or must have hoped it would—doesn’t mean that the film didn’t direct or sharpen a person’s thinking on one issue or another. As a filmmaker, all you can do is shine a light on a subject and hope that viewers leave the theater feeling more enlightened. 

To that end, The Gleaners and I is a clear success. In her later years, Varda inspired many people with her curiosity and creative spirit, to say nothing of her disarming personality. Of course you would want to talk to her, because she just seems so open to the full breadth of human experience, including the marginalized folks who would otherwise be ignored. How surprising it must have been for many of the subjects of The Gleaners and I to be asked about their day-to-day experiences. A guy living in a trailer without electricity or a gleaner who swoops into a potato field after the harvest are not used to getting any attention and now there’s a septuagenarian with a video camera who genuinely wants to hear what their lives are like. That’s what movies are all about. And I think, in aggregate, movies can be a profound source of activism merely for getting us to empathize with those who experience the world differently than we do. 

Speaking of different experiences, you were able to see a screening of The Red Shoes in Chicago earlier this month with the legendary Thelma Schoonmaker, director Michael Powell’s widow and Martin Scorsese’s longtime editor, in attendance. That will be our next Sight & Sound title, and I can’t wait to hear all about it. 

Previously:

#95 (tie): Get Out
#95 (tie): The General
#95 (tie): Black Girl
#95 (tie): Tropical Malady
#95 (tie): Once Upon a Time in the West
#95 (tie): A Man Escaped
#90 (tie): Yi Yi
#90 (tie): Ugetsu
#90 (tie): The Earrings of Madame De…
#90 (tie): Parasite
#90 (tie): The Leopard
#88 (tie): The Shining
#88 (tie): Chungking Express
#85 (tie): Pierrot le Fou
#85 (tie): Blue Velvet
#85 (tie): The Spirit of the Beehive
#78 (tie): Histoire(s) du Cinéma
#78 (tie): A Matter of Life and Death
#78 (tie): Celine and Julie Go Boating
#78 (tie): Modern Times
#78 (tie): A Brighter Summer Day
#78 (tie): Sunset Boulevard
#78 (tie): Sátántangó
#75 (tie): Imitation of Life
#75 (tie): Spirited Away
#75 (tie): Sansho the Bailiff
#72 (tie): L’Avventura
#72 (tie): My Neighbor Totoro
#72 (tie): Journey to Italy
#67 (tie): Andrei Rublev