The Gleaners and I

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine mentioned that Agnès Varda would be appearing at LACMA in conjunction with the screening of her The Gleaners and I (2000). I knew nothing about her, nor had I heard of the film before. I'm so grateful to my friend for the recommendation.

What follows are the rough notes I scribbled to myself during the screening and the question-and-answer session which followed:

• to glean -- as research method; the shift, as witnesses; people -- like food -- out of format. where does food come from; where does it go? think: the homeless in westwood
• there should be lines of respect that tie us together...
• it's also about the passage of time -- how do we witness that?
• the capacity of film to show the passage of time
• in fact, it presented a landscape and started to film it
• documentary raises the problem of documentary... she gets prizes, her subjects have nothing
• what i was most surprised at was falling in love with Ottoman

When I mentioned the film to another friend, she described how she had the film an incredibly productive way to think about 'salvage ethnography' --  which I understood to be a research method in which we (as researchers) salvage the scraps, the fragments, the marginalia which do not customarily enter into the archive of 'culture'. And I think that first note of mine speaks to what I found most interesting in this film: The way that Varda drew parallels between what she was observing (the gleaners, in their various forms and worlds) and her method of observation (also itself a kind of gleaning, or a returning to already-picked-over fields to see what was left).

The second question the film raised for me was the question of time; or more precisely, how is that we're able to show the passage of time? Durability, stone, decay, restoration -- these are all categories which wind their way through so much of my writing, and I was quite taken with the way that Varda kept pointing the camera at herself, asking how her own choice of subject matter was in many ways connected to her own sense of being a body that marked the passage of time.

As ever, good to think with.