The Gleaners and I and I

I should explain that I’m not really a movie person. At all, in fact. It’s not that I don’t like movies; I’m actually convinced that moving-image media is the pinnacle of art, combining everything that’s good about everything. But I’m terrible at watching things on my own. There’s something about the total surrender of a movie-viewing experience—the need to devote two hours of focused energy; the overwhelming synthesis of sound, visuals, and narrative—that frightens me, makes me fear I’ll feel too much. I’m always trying to mediate my experience. I’ll read the plot summary; I turn on subtitles to give me something concrete to follow.

But I’ve learned to love cinema—not just in theory, as a would-be art critic, but in practice. In the experience of watching, letting a film unfold. As the city locked down and the theaters closed, my partner and I retreated, like so many others, to the interior. During the day, we biked, crisscrossing Brooklyn to try every bánh mì the borough had to offer. At night, we watched movies together, huddled in his apartment: Burning, Clouds of Sils Maria, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, pausing during the Battle of Helm’s Deep to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Chungking Express and Kieślowski’s Three Colors. In that space, our lockdown universe of two, I learned to be patient. To be as still as the glacial, slow-motion beginning of Melancholia. To be as curious about life and its infinite, infinitely developing stories as Agnès Varda.

Varda’s film was inspired by witnessing gleaners on the streets of Paris stooping to pick up produce left over from markets. Her subjects include people who are frequently poor and unhoused, and who turn to gleaning out of necessity, whether to find food or to salvage materials, like scrap copper, to sell. Throughout the film it’s clear that gleaning is an act of necessity, but when we expand its definition, as Varda attempts, we see it’s also an act of love. It’s picking up what has escaped notice, paying attention to the fruit left on the vine. Late in the film, Varda turns her attention to a group of gleaners who dumpster-dive, gathering up food that’s near its sell-by date, cooking enormous meals before the meat goes bad. There are trayfuls of rabbit, stacks of chicken thighs. When Varda exclaims that they’ll be eating meat for weeks, one of the gleaners answers: “We always find someone to share it with.”

Varda’s gaze throughout the film is a loving one. A camera is an intrusion, but it also elevates: she meets her subjects, human and non-, with kindness. We see what she sees, which is also what she wants us to see, as she zooms in, panning over humble cabbages, heavy-headed sunflowers. A patch of mold from a water leak, spreading on the ceiling and into the wall, is reconfigured through her lens, becoming “a Tàpies, a Guo-Qiang, a Borderie.” We return to the heart-shaped potatoes, now sprouting and growing moldy too. But we stay, held by Varda’s interest. It is important to her, so it becomes important to us too.

This is my relationship to cinema—I want to love the things the person I love loves. And it is my relationship to love: because I love someone, I want to try to love what he loves. When I first watched The Gleaners and I, that day at BAM, I was paying extra attention. I wanted to love it the way my partner loved it, because I wanted to understand something about him. Varda’s film echoes this phenomenon of mine—it presents the idea that gleaning is a way of making use of something, of appreciating something that someone else has made use of. Of coasting beside it and learning why it’s useful, or beautiful, or full of potential. Maybe I’m a gleaner, too, in the way that I love—I’m always picking things up, scraping, incorporating them into my own life as a way of trying to understand someone else.