The Gleaners and I (2000)
Directed by Agnès Varda
Varda’s magnanimous, inquisitive road documentary is arguably the best work of any kind to begin by citing a dictionary definition. Picking up the thread (and accumulated wisdom) time leaves behind, it’s just the place Varda, curious and charmingly capricious, might begin. She’s a gleaner herself, clearly, but also a witness, a collector, a confessor, the gleaned. One hand holding her small digital camera (Varda was an early digital adopter), she greets apple pickers, French freegans, judges, truckers, and herself, musing over poverty, art, her age marked hands, her fading memory; her free hand gathers heart-shaped potatoes and handless clocks. The Gleaners and I is drawn to the forgotten and the left behind. But more than anything, Varda is passionate about life’s continual discovery and perseverance, the serendipitous, extra things we find and are happy to keep uncovering. Jeremy Polacek (Apr 21, 7:15pm; Apr 23, 5pm at the Varda sidebar in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Art of the Real“)