- dir. AGNÈS VARDA
- year 2000
- country FRANCE
- run-time 82MIN
- rating U
Tickets: £6/£4.50conc.
Doors 7:30PM
Film 8:00PM
Deptford Cinema presents a retrospective on the French artist Agnès Varda.
"The only female director of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda has been called both the movement’s mother and its grandmother. The fact that some have felt the need to assign her a specifically feminine role, and the confusion over how to characterize that role, speak to just how unique her place in this hallowed cinematic movement—defined by such decidedly masculine artists as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut—is. Varda not only made films during the nouvelle vague, she helped inspire it. Her self-funded debut, the fiction-documentary hybrid 1956’s La Pointe Courte is often considered the unofficial first New Wave film; when she made it, she had no professional cinema training (her early work included painting, sculpting, and photojournalism). Though not widely seen, the film got her commissions to make several documentaries in the late fifties. In 1962, she released the seminal nouvelle vague film Cléo from 5 to 7; a bold character study that avoids psychologizing, it announced her official arrival. Over the coming decades, Varda became a force in art cinema, conceiving many of her films as political and feminist statements, and using a radical objectivity to create her unforgettable characters. She describes her style as cinécriture(writing on film), and it can be seen in formally audacious fictions like Le bonheur and Vagabond as well as more ragged and revealing autobiographical documentaries like The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès." -The Criterion Collection
Beginning with the famous Jean-François Millet painting of women gathering wheat left over from a harvest, she focuses her ever-seeking eye on gleaners: those who scour already-reaped fields for the odd potato or turnip. Her investigation leads us from forgotten corners of the French countryside to off-hours at the green markets of Paris, following those who insist on finding a use for that which society has cast off, whether out of necessity or activism. Then, there is Varda herself, a gleaner of images and fragments.
“The Gleaners And I (2000) picks up several threads she’s followed throughout her career – a concern with traditional crafts and rituals, with the poor and marginalised, and with the everyday minutiae typically excluded from fiction.”
“Taking her lead from impressionist paintings and dictionary definitions (“to glean is to gather after the harvest”), Varda sets out to trace how the gleaner’s art has adapted to today’s mechanised world. Her odyssey leads her through a France that is tipping towards winter and spotlights a thriving scavenger culture on the fringes of mainstream society. Gleaning, she finds, has become an eclectic feast of late. True, the unemployed rustics who forage through a discarded potato mountain appear the most obvious descendants of the peasants of old. But the boho artist who collects his materials from the roadside is, in a sense, a gleaner too. As are the illicit fishermen plucking sandy oysters out of the retreating tide, or the crusty town kids charged with rifling the dustbins at their local Intermarche [...] Varda’s line of inquiry is gentle, curious, her role more that of a browser than a director. The tack pays off in a film that is at once airily free-form and oddly profound.”