Creighton and I spent our morning with a documentary recommended by our friend Rachel: The Gleaners and I. Made by Agnès Varda around 2000, it’s French and quirky. It’s also insightful as hell.
Working with simple hand-held equipment and flirting with themes of love and mortality, Agnès traverses her country to examine the concept of gleaners, those who walk the fields after a harvest to salvage and make use of what’s left behind. The painting that inspired her journey is from 1857, but it’s the modern-day accounts of people who are still gleaning that really get you thinking about how much we waste. These intrepid souls don’t let grapes rot on the vine or copper tubing from old TVs go to the landfill. No way! And that’s a source of great pride for many modern-day gleaners.
We savored having Agnès introduce us to all these beautiful characters who can’t fathom why anyone would let good things be turned to trash. One particulary touching portrait was of a man with a master’s degree who chooses to eat what’s discarded from Paris’s bakeries and street markets while he works without pay to teach immigrants to read. And we loved her intimate portraits of artists who are inspired to work with ordinary, every-day discarded items.
As someone trying to understand her own obsession with nothing-new, this was a morning well spent. Nothing I’ve watched to date has gotten closer to the psychology of one person’s trash as another’s treasure. It’s treasure that provides, for some, the will to live, and for others, the ability to live as they choose.
It’s on Netflix Watch Instantly. I recommend wathing it. Instantly.
After spending the morning with Agnès and her friends, I couldn’t help but think of another documentary recently in theaters, Bill Cunningham New York. Bill has been photographing the style of the streets of New York for decades, and in this documentary, at age 84, he still takes off on his bike, wearing the functional blue smocks he purchases at the hardware store, and gets to it. Watch the documentary and you’ll marvel at the contrast between the complexity of his work and the modest simplicity of his lifestyle. He lives in what basically amounts to a closet with a cot because he’d rather have artistic freedom than money. Money, he explains, always has strings attached.
At the end of this one, you’ll want to hug everyone you see. You’ll thank goodness for the sheer knowledge that such a “happy and nice man” (as Roger Ebert put it) is able to not only exist but find his place in this crazy world.
there’s more...
