Gleaning and the Arts of the Present: Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I (2000)

In Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), the aged filmmaker narrates her travels around rural and urban France in search of gleaners who practice the art of gleaning leftover produce.¹ Along the way, she meets gleaners of all stripes, as well as artists, jurists whose paths intersect with these practices, and suggests that she, as a filmmaker, is always already a gleaner herself. Varda’s willingness to see gleaning everywhere may at first glance seem to mirror Anthropocenic political geo-theologies that see the shadow of anthropos at every turn.² Strategic juxtapositions produce, however, in The Gleaners and I, aesthetic intimacies that challenge easy determinations of life and death, pastness and futurity, and the nature of technicity and historicity.

In its self-reflexivity and ambition to suggest a metaphorology of subsistence in its paradigmatic gesture, the film knows full well that “what all media mediates is life”, that they are the “environment for life”.³ Where it stakes out its own terrain is in making a complex media-symbolic tautology, out of gleaning. Varda takes up what we know of life and finds subsistence lying within.⁴ In the film, she develops gleaning as an “oscillation between a figural subsistence and a historical mode of subsistence” that mirrors what Mark B. N. Hansen claims is the “ineliminable oscillation between the materiality and the phenomenality of media”.⁵ Theorizing such a way of moving in the world bears out Lenora Hanson’s thesis, that “dispossession is not the historical rupture of enclosure or the mechanism that converts all historically significant labor into standardized form. It is, rather, the knottier entwinement of our motley and deviating means of subsistence with the process of capital accumulation, in a process that dispossesses history of any essential binaries or linear movements of past and present.”⁶ That this sounds rather like what Shane Denson calls a “dis/correlative” regime is the starting point for my inquiry.⁷

Building on Hanson, Hansen, and Denson, I consider Varda’s film in relation to institutional landscapes populated by “vagrantly vague” artistic practices.⁸ I am interested in reappraising and characterizing media objects among these broader flickering constellations of certainty. The pastoral is perhaps as old as the earliest textual strata of our evolutionary histories; where it appears, “rude speeches … insinuate and [glance] at greater matters”.⁹ A “more sustained account” of how the figural “appears as a use value” is incomplete without a consideration of how media theory’s transformations of the parameters of sensibility and appearance should shape our understanding of political economy – it is a more generalized account of vagrancy that is at stake here.¹⁰

If we take media theory itself to be an originary problematic, the infrastructural critique of judgment, what are the pathways between the oscillating nexus of embodiment and feedback, the domain of transductive aesthesis, and other geographies of epistemological and institutional natality and mortality, making and unmaking, such as accounting, law, biology, bibliography, or poetics?¹¹ How do we tell stories about mediation and its institution when movement and vagrancy themselves become difficult to untangle from figurative and material subsistence, the spatialization or temporalization of schemata of affectivity themselves from the regimes that normatively regulate lives as eternal or fugitive?¹²

These questions are relevant to Varda’s film because The Gleaners and I explicitly apposes radically nonsubjective intrusions into perceptuality and crises of subsistence that blur boundaries between natality and mortality, ends and beginnings.¹³ Gleaning allows the film to suggest the potential of interventions that work backwards from the operativity of trajectories to appearance, creation, legislation, correlation, and other modes.¹⁴ For John Durham Peters, who proposes an infrastructuralism as a “way of understanding the work of media as fundamentally logistical”, originary correlators, as media, are increasingly working at post-symbolic, sub-linguistic levels.¹⁵ The Gleaners and I operationalizes this framework and theorizes subsistence as a media-symbolic paradigm bound to the legacy of the aesthetic. To trace the metamorphoses of gleaning as subsistence, I consider the arc of the film as opening up to three modes of gleaning in the present.

Aesthesis: Gleaning as Continuing

(figs. 1 and 2)

In one of the first scenes of the film (see fig. 1 and 2), Varda sets the tone of the film with a series of staged, mirrored, and glitched shots of herself. Establishing that she is the glaneuse of the title, she stands next to Andre Breton’s painting of a female gleaner, posing with straw on her shoulder against a background held up by two men. The mise-en-scène draws attention to the filmmaker as a gleaner, musically accompanied by a melodic hint of shimmering interiority. “I’m happy to drop the ears of wheat and pick up my camera,” she remarks. Noting the handheld digital camera (then a relative novelty) in which much of the film is shot, she calls their effects “stroboscopic, narcissistic, even hyperrealistic”. Frame rates visibly slow as Varda’s own image in various resting postures appears in devices of capture: mirrors, cameras, etc. This heuristic perceptual discorrelation continues as we hear Varda contemplate her own old age and extinction to shots of her combing her greying hair and close-ups of her wrinkled hands on a steering wheel: “still, my hair and my hands keep telling me the end is near.” Varda’s looming death is conjugated by the discorrelations of the destabilization of cinema (and the lifeworlds of anthropos) itself, bringing an insistently phenomenological perspective to bear on the question of how captures and countercaptures of soul and body operate within new regimes of discorrelation.

What happens in these frames, from the point of view of a filmic aesthesis, is a haunting terminus to vagrancy and motion where extinction and expectation seem to become undistinguishable within a projection of subject-object relations. These frames suggest an emptying out of reflexive affectivity for the subject of the film, of Varda confronting a grammatical finitude both spiritual and physical, as a filmmaker and an aging woman. It may not do, however, to understand this state as simply a testament to affective interdependence, as auto-affection, or as a technical transduction. The artist’s awareness of endings and beginnings cannot be experienced subjectively by the viewer, and the scene solicits neither projection nor subjection. This complex situation in media is transmitted in the form of a staged discorrelation in which natalities and mortalities – collective and individual – are scrambled in processes that converge in the contract of aesthesis.¹⁶ This scene can only be absorbed by a traject of which aesthesis forms a critical part, opening up the suggestion of an oscillation that occurs between aesthesis and other processual operativities.¹⁷ Such a moment of capture exists at the nexus of various conceptions and processes of generativity and decay between subject, person, world, and planet, each of which are mutually interpenetrating and radically unstable. In baring the infrastructure for the aesthetic suture of processuality, this introduction to the gleaner begins to pave the way for a more generalized understanding that, in contemporary life-worlds, gleaning – the symbol of subsistence – is a process of building upwards from media-symbolic glitches, of trajective experiences of affective finitude that coalesce and collapse into pathos and paths. This opening act thus locates aesthesis, and the film itself as an apparent enactment of gleaning, within a wider constellation of subsymbolic and supersymbolic practices. Aesthetics as gleaning is, as a recent Whiteheadian argument goes, the figure of recollecting “a field of intrinsic relations that reconnects the event to perceptions.”¹⁸

The image of Varda’s hands emerges again and again throughout the film, at one point gently touching reproductions of Rembrandt purchased in Tokyo. In this scene, she says, “this is 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. Here’s Rembrandt’s self-portrait. But it’s really the same thing. It’s always a self-portrait.” Varda’s insistence on the film as self-portrait, on a filmic phenomenology, is one of trajective estrangement, opening up space to explore the affective intimacies of the infrastructures of sensibility with animality, old age, and death as intrinsically in dialogue with its generative creative potential.

Efficacy: Gleaning as Virtue

(fig. 3)

Subsistence, as a crisis of ends and beginnings, is also a question of efficacy and virtuality. In one of the final scenes of the film, Varda explains that among a cast of complex and interesting subjects, she was most intrigued by a bespectacled man she filmed for weeks, who surprised her when she asked him why he was always gleaning produce (parsley, on that particular day) in the city streets. He (fig. 3) patiently explained to her that parsley had immense nutritional value, being rich in “vitamin C and E, beta carotene, zinc, magnesium”. Upon further inquiry, Varda learns that he eats “six or seven apples a day”. Asked about his preference for a balanced diet, he explains that he holds a master’s degree in biology and “used to be a teaching assistant”. Because of this, people are surprised when they find out that he sells papers and magazines at the train station for a living. We then learn that he spent nights at the migrant housing where he lives teaching French to immigrants who could not read or write. Varda muses that it surprised her “how long it took [her] to find out about his nocturnal activity as a volunteer in a suburban basement.”

For all we learn about this man, however, he is a conspicuously gleaned collection of various media flows. As a saintly phenomenon, he raises questions of efficacy, of how effects are achieved in transmission of media -- the cameras and film artifacts through which we learn of his existence, the newspapers he distributes, the people who walk past him, the gleaned diet that nourishes him, his biology education, as well as his linguistic fluency and pedagogy. There is an odd relationship between our conceptions of virtue and virtuality and various bio- and geo-logics of immanence. In medieval European poetry and dance, for instance, virtue and virtuality were closely connected to movement, to ductus (as in “transduction”), and to intentio (as in “intention”).¹⁹ Ductus was, already at the time, “the way in which a work guides those experiencing it through itself” , and intentio was a key component in the medieval making of Scholastic media theory.²⁰ Another precedent is found in gemstones, such as crystals, which were considered “transmissible virtue” in the medieval Mediterranean world.²¹ Virtue was “moral excellence, but also the spiritual force of an event, physical strength, an act of divine power, a miracle, a wonder, and a magical power especially in reference to a precious stone.”²² As one scholar writes, “lithic virtues can be transmitted and circulated, creating a community of virtue grounded in and circulating through shared material substances that overcome earthly time. Crystal effects deborderisation as dwelling entails a continuous vacillation between material bodies and spiritual states.”.²³ Her account of the stone suggests that lithic virtue – the virtue transmitted and created by early racializing media – sustained a profound, lived kinship between pagan deathworlds and Christian worlds of eternal life.

In the context of the man in Varda’s work, the media flows of gleaning create a halo of virtue that raise questions of a “geo-poethical” nature.²⁴ These media objects create orbs that allow worlds of natality and mortality to flow into one another. Such processes can create an alchemy of race and geology, but they are also how gleaning might produce insurgent geologies. Attributions of virtue and the histories that create legibility for transmissible virtues are deeply interconnected, if not mutually constitutive -- which is not to diminish the man’s way of life, but to highlight that questions of virtue and virtuality focus geopower’s aporetic attributions of efficacy. A deeply racialized and gendered term itself, virtue (from vir for man) speaks to a Western conception of efficacy as rooted in performance. Hidden within virtue’s etymology is the positing of “forces originating within but also supplementary to that which is embodied and material”.²⁵ Transmissible virtue – the exemplarity of its intrinsically decipherable, if transductive, externalization – is always conjugated by the contradictions of gleaning, but it also claims an intellectual grandeur in its ambition. Its appearance is a contradiction that reminds us that new stories can still be told about our highest values.

Superimposition: Gleaning as Control

(fig. 4)

In his polemical proposal of a “control society” of “dividuals”, Gilles Deleuze declares enclosure to be a now belated mode of institutionality.²⁶ Whether we adopt this periodization or not, the position of gleaning as the media-symbolic act of subsistence is transformed as the historical process of enclosure itself is recontextualized within wider intellectual, genealogical, and ethical vistas. Varda’s exploration of the laws (and other intellectual boundaries) that govern gleaning leads her to seek out jurists. In one scene, a barrister strolling in cabbage fields claims to discover in the French law code the legal basis of gleaning today in an edict “dated to November 2, 1554”. It authorizes “the poor, the wretched, the underprivileged to go into the fields once the harvest is over.” When Varda asks him what to make of those who “want for nothing” and “glean for pleasure”, the barrister responds that they, too, can be understood as lacking a certain sustenance, as they lack for pleasure. He insists that they can glean “just as the poor once did”.²⁷ Varda analogizes this to her filming vegetables that catch her eye, a filmic eye in which we partake. “There is no law governing this type of gleaning,” she says, “of images, impressions, emotions,” she says to shots of various flora and a panning shot of the view of from a train in the French countryside. The dictionary, she reminds us, gives “gleaning” (glaner) a figurative meaning too: collecting information. As Varda moves from gleaner to gleaner, from scene to scene, gleaning becomes a metaphor for how objects beckon to and sustain her: “what I’ve gleaned tells me where I’ve been”. Chance findings, paintings, and found objects of various sorts, in turn, make their way into her collections as “gleaned pleasure”. The visual language of terroir invites a projection of natural plenty, sometimes obstructing meaningful engagement with human histories of environmentality, biology, and geology.²⁸

Like the systems that create surpluses to be gleaned, the legal fiction of gleaning as authorized by need seems both historical and mythic – it is an origin myth. “Each party played its part, applying its own blinkered logic,” as Varda puts it in a later scene where a judge and the youth gleaners in her court differ on their interpretations. That to “glean for pleasure” is to do “as the poor once did” is an analogy so odd as to seem willfully ironic, especially so given the poverty of many of those depicted in the film. The status of this analogy, however, also proves Lenora Hanson’s point, that substitutive conceptions of subsistence, derived from law, sometimes obscure the racialized and gendered varieties of human vagrancy. Varda’s holding in tension “a figural subsistence and a historical mode of subsistence” opens up space to consider how the facticity of subsistence is produced, which involves the triangulation of various justificatory regimes of figurality, historicity, and ontology.²⁹ Varda plays on this irony, noting that “there is no law governing [the] gleaning of images, impressions, emotions”. Law, constrained as it is by constructions of institutionality tied to specific constructions of iterability, is unable to recognize the varieties of subsistence.³⁰ For Varda here, gleaning never becomes a reified practice, but instead is a quantum that superimposes and connects the pasts, presents, and futures of anthropos and its others. Like the modulation performed by a “self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other”, gleaning is a media-symbol of subsistence produced in superimposition and correlation.³¹

(fig. 5)

The film ends on a striking and puzzling note: conservators bring the painting above, “Gleaners Fleeing Before the Storm” (fig. 5), into the open air for Varda to film. “To see the gleaners in broad daylight, with stormy gusts lashing the canvas, was a true delight,” she says. With this enigmatic statement, the film cuts to credits. This scene recalls Jennifer Fay’s readings of Buster Keaton, whose “environmental comedy” reveals “modernist weather in the making”.³² Twentieth century cinema is, after all, “precisely an occasion to ‘confuse’ oneself with the performance and the environment, while keeping some form of distance, if only for safety”.³³ With the doubled representations here, Varda seems to conceptualize the work of the artist as enacting the strategic correlation of affectivity and affect -- the repatriation of subsistence practices of all sorts, with all their risks and valves, into “broad daylight”, the realm of symbolic circulation, where they would be repositioned in an condition where the environmental affectability of this artifactual heritage could be reckoned with. She delights in doing this work, despite the storms ahead, calling it one of the “high points” of the filming process. The terrain of the artist here is asking, as Kathryn Yusoff writes, how do we “think about encountering the coming storm in ways that do not facilitate its permeant renewal”, and we would add, beyond the “meshwork of anti-Blackness and colonial structures of the Anthropocene”?³⁴ Gleaning as superimposition is retooling the convections between the post-symbolic and the symbolic, the correlation of acts, representations, and objects into sense.

Conclusion

In this essay, I speculate on Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I as opening up to a nexus of questions. Gleaning, as the media-symbolic act of subsistence par excellence, brings into focus questions of beginnings and ends as well as the relationship between the central and the marginal. I have read gleaning in three modes of the present: aesthesis, efficacy, and superimposition. One of my goals has been to experiment with a practical criticism with open ideas about what the facticity of practice looks like and that holds frames such as aesthetics, materialisms, philosophy, rhetoric, and ethics in tension with one another: to attempt to start from the operativity of trajectories – aesthetic, geological, social, ethical, biological, and others – and retrofit and re-parcel our certainties and knowledges from that point. The reader can judge whether such a way of moving in ideas in the present could be worthwhile.