Why underrated?


It is interesting to look at the vote rating reports:

215 US users 6.9
258 Non-US users 7.6

The main reason may be the anti-consumerism of the movie.
But I guess Agnes Varda has been underrated in USA, I can't find any of her DVDs in the libary of my university(How could they even have movie major here?).
And I couldn't find her DVD in Blockbuster last year I remeber, though now they have them.

By the way, Varda seems to have pretty high prestige in China, they called her the Grandmother of New Wave,:-) (How would Gordad think about that?)

reply

Wow that's definitely not stereotyping. I'm pretty sure the reason a lot of Americans didn't like it was because of Varda's pretentious ramblings interspersed randomly throughout the film. If she would've left those out, the film could've been great. I do have a lot of respect for Varda as a filmmaker, but I think she crossed the line into self indulgence several times during this one.

"So horribly sad. How is it that I feel like laughing?"

reply

I agree with you, SirusX11,and the vegetarian, Masters degree having French teacher. Agnès Varda was quite narcissistic and self indulgent several times during both movies. The second 2002 followup was actually worse.

I consider myself a big documentary film fan and I prefer the documentaries where the film maker steps back and lets the story tell itself. Without overly injecting themselves onto the screen.

Some of the time Madame Varda spent showing the swinging lens cap and talking about herself could have been spent telling more of the subjects' stories.



No two persons ever watch the same movie.

reply

Well, the film is called The Gleaners and *I* for a reason. It's documenting the lives of the gleaners and at the same time it documents the director being affected by the content of her film. It's funny that the shortcomings you listed are what, in my opinion, made the film so special.

reply

[deleted]

It's documenting the lives of the gleaners and at the same time it documents the director being affected by the content of her film.Well said! Thank you!Agnes Varda is Le Glaneuse (the Gleaner) and she Glanant (was gleaning).She was a Gleaner Gleaning everything before her eyes, images, objects, the natural environment, people, invisible worlds, ideas (ideas which stream throughout her entire filmographic repertoire), her own body, etc.The Gleaning included Agnes' conscious and subconscious reactions - and they were incredibly powerful reactions because the reactions themselves ran the gamut of human emotion - to what she was Gleaning externally. Wrinkled gnarled hands that resembled the hands of field labourouers yet she never worked a day of her life in the fields. What are our hands made for if not for labouring over the fields of the earth or capturing humanity in oilworks or direct hands-on reductioning of waste through recycling/upcycling, my hands, so gnarled, just like misshapen potatoes nobody wants, hold the world in them (fingers air-grabbing and snuffing out the tractor-trailors: hands vanquish the trucks, what the hands create locally from the immediate environs for the immediate environs is essential to life whereas whatever was being hauled by the trucks for mass consumption is non-essential waste, the human hands the most powerful tool in existence and we're wasting that potential, fingers snuffing the trucks out - inconsequentiality of life), , wrinkles reminding her of how little time she has left to bring attention to the issues that she's always addressed in her films, self-gleaning one's mortality, looming at the loom of time, reflects her old-age insouciance towards the state of the world and that insouciance, the ease with which we're all easily distracted from what really matters, is why the world is in the state it's in, gnarled hands and old age make her a social outcast, just like the homeless and the gleaners and caravaneers and pickers and hoarders and upcyclers are social outcasts, just like the mass amount of excess food wasted, just like mass amount of expired food prematurely wasted, she's collecting images usually deemed unworthy of cinematic treatment and as an old woman she's deemed unworthy of cinematic treatment, she's gleaning a world deemed unworthy of a second glance or special consideration by the mainstream masses and as an old women she's deemed unworthy of a second glance or special consideration by the mainstream masses, just like excess food and unsold food and expired food is deemed unworthy of second consideration and without a thought tossed away, just like much of the excess amounts of non-edible garbage we throw away are deemed as unworthy for usage and tossed out without a moment's consideration (donate it, recycle it, yardsale it, etc), , she's gleaning herself to not only figure out her place within the invisible world she's traversing through but to remind viewers that her entire life's work has focused on all the issues presented Les Glaneurs Et La Glaneues, and as such, the documentary, a recapitulation of those themes and more, must,for her, include her gleaning herself, just as she spent her life gleaning everything else, , and Agnes turning inward is a subtle reminder to viewers that only by turning inward can we begin to understand and confront the external.It's mindboggling how Alain (master's in biology, teacher, marathon runner) and others equate her self-introspection as unnecessary irrelevant moments of self-absorption when her self-introspection unified her physically mentally spiritually culturally socially politically with her subjects - her subjects including the unwanted misshapen potatoes and abandoned vineyard with rich ripe grapes (Agnes: decaying corpus with brilliant mind and youthful persona intact) and lush red tomatoes hidden in a tangle of greenery and unwanted excesses cabbages and washed up oysters and mouldly roofs and handless clocks and famous oilworks (whose subjects have much to say about the state of the world.....) stowed away in the dark and her personal memorabilia (stuff that has meaning for her but might be perceived as meaningless worthless hodge podge to the viewer) and a cat (cats misunderstood and relegated to the margins of society....), and being deeply affected by her subjects and motivated by those feelings to do everything in her power to put it all in a documentary and disseminate it to the world, delivering a documentary that unwittingly promotes a lifestyle bypassing the hegemony of the world's capitalistic labour economic machine as much as it indicts the global hegemonic economic machine.Her fingers catching and snuffing out the trucks was playful yet heavily symbolic, genius masterstroke of her to include that.10/10

reply

Agnes La Glaneuse continued, not "I" but La Glaneuse, gleaner of the female gender, she's gleaning her unremarkable misshapen spotted wrinkled worn-out unwanted body, her body at the throw-away age, just like the wasted misshapen unwanted food, food that is sometimes ragged and wrinkled and spotted and discoloured, just like her cottage roof. After months gleaning the gleaners she returns to her cottage and stoops, her zooming stoops, her grasping gestures are like the gleaners' grasping gestures, viewers need to see Agnes in her own element post-filming because the effects of what she's witnessed linger on long after she returns home, the affects on the director are what make the film so provocative. She sees herself as unwanted ignored waste, overdue, past the expiration date, undesirous, which makes her see herself as unified, one and the same, with the wasted discarded food as much as with the gleaner painting locked away in the dusty recesses of the museum storeroom, as well as unified with the gleaners themselves. In her own home, her comfort, she gets a bit complacent and self-indulgent - just like we all do after witnessing severe deprivations, I mentioned that insouciance/indifference earlier, and it's extremely important that she kept the indifferent footage that little bit of footage emphasized the whole point of her project - wildly extravagant waste (food and non-food alike) and complacency towards that excessive waste on a massive scale. The director admitting her own complicity with footage of her own complacency and self-indulgence - which parallels the world's complacency and self-indulgence - subtly imbues the documentary with apocalyptic undertones. Something else I picked up on after a second-viewing, she films the misshaped/heart-shaped potatoes multiple times, documenting their decay, just as she's documenting the decay of her body and the decay of capitalism and society and the increasing divide between the salvageable and the unsalvageable elements (elements = people, things, ideas) of society. Yet within that decay she's also documenting things that counter that decay and bridge the divide between the salvageable and the unsalvageable - environmental consciousness, freeganism, waste-based art, upcycling, downcycling, bricolage. She invested the concept of glanage with so much versatility that her concept of glanage transformed what could have been a "nothing new" essay-documentary about "trash-picking" lumpenproletariat into a spellbinding, open-ended dialogue about how people of all demographics (Les Glaneurs in the film include middle-and-upper class people, not merely street people) are intentionally and unintentionally subverting the hegemonic capitalistic labour machine and its accompanying property laws and mass production and mass consumption and mass waste and the ineffective disposal of said waste, people going right to the source of production and capitalizing on the capitalism's waste. The Glaneurs demonstrating their hard-work and usefulness and ingenuity and productivity. And something else, Agnes' rhizomatic treatment of Glaneurs and Glanage pulls the rug out from under the cinematic history of the Parisian Baudelairian Flaneur. Out with the classical, probing, egocentric, restless [french new wave camera] eye wary of and awed by but indifferent to the spectacle of capitalism, and in with the postmodern ( humbled and humanistic, focused and participatory eye critical of and not fooled by and deeply concerned with the spectacle of capital, bending down to ground from sunrise to sunset to glean the excess capital of capitalism.

reply

Because the vast majority of people care more about their place in the dirt than their place in the stars.

reply