Essay and Varda.Pdf

ANGEL AKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 12 number 2 august 2007 Gleaning [glanage] itself is unknown – is forgotten. The word is passe´. I was intrigued by people in the street picking up discarded food, and I wondered: what’s happening to the fields of wheat? Nothing there left to glean. So I visited the potato fields, and I found these heart-shaped potatoes, and it made me feel good. It made me feel that I was on the right track. Films always originate in emotions. This time it was seeing so many people combing the marketplace or rummaging through super- market trash bins for leftovers. Seeing them made me want to film them and, specifically, what could not be filmed without their consent. How can one bear witness without hindering them? s.d. chrostowska Agne`s Varda, ‘‘‘Gleaning’ the Passion of Agne`s Varda’’1 VIS -A' -VIS THE gestures and postures GLANEUSE gne`s Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse A[The Gleaners and I] was filmed between September 1999 and March 2000 and released stroller, is a character of nineteenth-century later that year, marking film’s entry into the new French urban, and specifically Parisian, culture. millennium. Along with its companion piece, Les He has been well documented, given much Glaneurs et la glaneuse ... deux ans apre`s [The critical attention, and come to be adopted as an Gleaners and I: Two Years Later] (2002),2 it is a emblem of sorts by film theorists and film prime representative of a protean genre known as historians.5 The second figure, the glaneuse or the film-essay.3 Most importantly, however, the gleaner, once a fixture of the French rural, film offers an icon for digitally emancipated film peasant way of life, has not yet been the subject of and the consciousness of the image as manipu- such discourses. The third, the chiffonnier or lated (from the French manipule, or ‘‘handful, as ragpicker, belongs, like the flaˆneur, to the of grain’’).4 Parisian landscape, but in a rather different The logic of Agne`s Varda’s recent films invites capacity. My intention in this three-faceted a pair of comparisons. The terms to be compared comparison is to show that the glaneuse shares are the activities of flaˆnerie, glanage and with the chiffonnier several crucial traits that chiffonnage – or the figures of the flaˆneur, the distinguish her from the flaˆneur, and that these glaneuse, and the chiffonnier, all three historical relationships hold on the figurative level, speci- ‘‘types’’ in their own right. The first, the city- fically in relation to the medium of film. ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/07/020119^15 ß 2007 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki DOI:10.1080/09697250701755092 119 the glaneuse My argument is plain: Varda’s perspective in [...] [This focus] has allowed scholars to her two films about gleaning renders the extrapolate from the descriptions of the glaneuse’s modus operandi antithetical to flaˆn- flaˆneur to envision a historically specific erie and akin to the me´tier of the chiffonnier. If mode of experiencing the spectacle of the the flaˆneur – that modern, bourgeois male, often city in which the viewer assumes the position of being able to observe, command, and characterized as a distracted, egocentric urban participate in this spectacle all at the same spectator of capitalism – stands for classical, time. (28–29) narrative cinema, then the glaneuse can be seen as a postmodern cinematic figure, a keen Benjamin himself saw twentieth-century manifes- participant-observer (transcending the gender tations of flaˆnerie as an anachronism, surviving divide) of the rural and urban spheres alike. on borrowed time – although, as he tells us in Through Varda’s lens, the work of gleaning ‘‘Die Wiederkehr des Flaˆneurs [The Return of stands for documentary/essayistic, anti-consumer- the Flaˆneur],’’ the figure did make a comeback in ist, democratic, empathetic filmmaking. the twentieth century.8 Since Benjamin, The flaˆneur, as theorized by Walter Benjamin ‘‘[t]he figure and the activity appear regularly and taken up by his many commentators, was a in the attempts of social and cultural commenta- habitual, leisurely walker, taking in the cityscape tors to get some grip on the nature and in a whimsical, impassive, aleatory manner, in implications of the conditions of modernity and possession of himself but desperate to lose his post-modernity.’’9 In one of these interpretations, bearings. Reacting to boredom, attuned to the the flaˆneur’s observational stance, his propensity quotidian and the obscure, his desire – unlike the for watching city life go by, is seen as prefiguring tourist’s but like the voyeur’s – was aroused by and configuring the (apparently) neutral, prob- the patterns and flow of capital before his eyes. ing, roving eye of the motion-picture camera.10 His ambulatory urge, which could strike him at Thus, flaˆnerie was already cinematic before the any hour of the day, and his impulsive changes of birth of cinema as such, and (by way of its pace (depending on where his legs took him) inherent voyeurism) proto-cinephilic before the signified someone with too much leisure time on emergence of cinephilia. Indeed, more than his hands – hence the association of flaˆnerie with simply a precursor of cinematic form, the idleness. Flaˆnerie had little in common with experience of flaˆnerie mirrors the values and pedestrianism save for habitat and being incog- desires of consumer society later represented and nito. Whereas the pedestrian ‘‘wedged himself satisfied in narrative film. into the crowd,’’ the flaˆneur’s habitus and ‘‘art of That said, the above portrait of flaˆnerie and its strolling’’ required ‘‘elbow room,’’ which arcades relation to cinema culture is over a century old. 6 and boulevards amply provided. Finally, his Assuming it is not already obsolete, how has inhabiting of the city ‘‘split[s] [it] into its flaˆnerie changed? How do today’s flaˆneurs and dialectical poles. It becomes a landscape that flaˆneuses habituate themselves, where do they opens up to him and a parlour [an inte´rieur] that train their gaze, by what means do they 7 encloses him.’’ Abstracted in this way, the perpetuate their diversion? If recent discussions flaˆneur becomes something of a capitalist myth. are any indication, updated flaˆnerie is primarily Although ‘‘[ f ]laˆnerie has become so common a window-shopping, a shadow of its former state.11 term to describe urban spectatorship that it has The jury is still out on whether it may be carried begun to seem hollow,’’ writes Vanessa R. out only on foot in city streets, or also by vehicle, Schwartz, inside a mall, irrespective of social class. Although the flaˆneuse, the flaˆneur’s female it can still be used to describe the historically specific conditions of spectatorship in the counterpart, has joined the latter in theoretical consumer-oriented city that emphasizes mobi- argot (the issue being historical rights to the lity and fluid subjectivity and pleasure. activity of flaˆnerie), there are scarcely more than Benjamin understood the flaˆneur [...] as traces of the flaˆneuse’s historical visibility. If a ‘‘type’’ who exemplified urban spectators these seem like moot points, it may be because 120 chrostowska flaˆnerie’s cultural relevance is due for recon- Varda has shown that film, as a medium of sideration. Debate over the limits of its figurative such interaction, can make use of the experience hyperextension suggests that flaˆnerie as a con- and principles of glanage. We may wonder about cept may need to be retired to make way for the effectiveness of such translations and exten- another sociocultural genealogy. In particular, its sions, but Varda’s Glaneurs effortlessly performs ideological white-male pedigree poses problems the transitions from the literal to the metaphor- as a symbol for contemporary, diasporic, multi- ical modalities of gleaning. In the latter sense, cultural film art. Quite independently of this, gleaning means salvaging from oblivion. It should however, film today – in the midst of a digital be mentioned that Varda’s film is an intrepid, far- revolution and the resurgence of documentary- from-nostalgic reflection on transience and his- style filmmaking – deserves an emblem of torical/personal memory. Varda’s ‘‘objects’’ – its own. whether human, animal, animate or inanimate – Varda’s glaneuse is a discernible alternative, a represent, like the chiffons of the chiffonnier, not kind of ‘‘second sex’’ that lends itself to just things past but things forgotten, not merely theorization relative to the flaˆneur. Even the traces but the very debris of history.13 A though the masculine-plural ‘‘glaneurs’’ in clock emptied of its mechanism, one of Varda’s Varda’s title is gender-inclusive, gleaners were ‘‘finds,’’ is ‘‘my kind of thing. You don’t see time traditionally glaneuses, women gathering grain passing.’’14 (She places it on her mantelpiece, her left behind by reapers.12 These subtleties are lost reflection passing behind this improvised tableau in the English translation. As Varda explains, like a ghost.) Gleaning also has a mnemonic purpose: ‘‘And for forgetful me, it’s what I’ve In French we have the masculine and the gleaned that tells where I’ve been’’ (Glaneurs). feminine [forms of the noun ‘‘gleaner’’], so the Like the flaˆneur, the chiffonnier figures title Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse doesn’t prominently in the writings of Charles translate [into English] [...] We had to Baudelaire, inspiring Benjamin’s reflections in translate it as ‘‘The Gleaners and I,’’ which both his 1938 study of Paris and the 1927–40 emphasizes in a way the ‘‘I.’’ In the French, ‘‘glaneuse’’ refers to an anonymous female Passagen-Werk [Arcades Project]. Baudelaire gleaner. That little nuance [...] makes it more described the ragpicker as a creature living off important than me.

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