Sample Answer
Exploring the Self in Agnes Varda’s Gleaners and I
Documentary film has long been associated with the pursuit of social truth and realism, tracing back to John Grierson, who defined it as “the creative treatment of actuality.” Grierson emphasised documentary’s role in educating and informing audiences, presenting social issues in a structured, observational manner. In contrast, the essay film occupies a more reflective, personal space, blending narrative, observation, and philosophical inquiry. Unlike classical documentary, the essay film foregrounds the filmmaker’s subjectivity, often employing reflexivity and self-commentary as key modes of engagement. While documentary is primarily concerned with external reality, the essay film mediates reality through the lens of the filmmaker’s consciousness, creating a hybrid space that is at once factual, poetic, and performative.
Agnes Varda, a central figure in the French New Wave, brought this hybrid sensibility to her work. Known for her innovative use of cinematic form, Varda blurred the lines between fiction, documentary, and personal reflection. Her background in photography and early experimental films imbued her works with a strong visual and formal sensibility, while her socially conscious outlook shaped the thematic core of her films. In Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, 2000), Varda uses the essay-film form to explore notions of marginality, labor, and human engagement with objects and landscape, while simultaneously interrogating her own presence and perspective. The film’s exploration of “self” is both literal, in Varda’s personal involvement and reflection, and metaphorical, in the way she frames human and non-human subjects.
Overview of the Film and Its Modes
Gleaners and I follows Varda as she documents contemporary gleaners, people who collect leftover crops, discarded objects, or other materials, as a way of examining consumer culture, sustainability, and social inequality. The film is structured as a series of encounters: with rural farmers, urban scavengers, artists, and even discarded objects themselves. Its thematic focus is on the act of gleaning as both survival strategy and philosophical reflection, revealing broader cultural and environmental concerns.
Varda’s film resists classification into a single documentary mode. It incorporates interactive modes, in which she engages directly with her subjects, asking questions and eliciting responses; performative elements, as Varda’s personality, reactions, and reflections are foregrounded throughout; and poetic modes, in which visual composition, sound design, and montage create lyrical, associative meanings. For example, sequences depicting sunlight glinting on discarded metal, or the close-ups of wrinkled hands sifting through potatoes, operate less as objective reportage than as contemplative visual essays. This hybridity renders the film difficult to categorise, demonstrating how the essay film’s form is uniquely suited to explore complex ideas through multiple lenses simultaneously.
Self-Reflexivity and Textual Analysis
A defining feature of Gleaners and I is its self-reflexivity, positioning the filmmaker as both observer and participant. The potato scene exemplifies this: Varda examines discarded potatoes in a field, juxtaposing them with her own reflections on aging and mortality. As she holds and inspects the tubers, her voice-over comments on the beauty and transience of these overlooked objects, blending personal meditation with documentary observation. Scholars often emphasise the socio-economic reading of this scene, highlighting how discarded food reveals inequalities in consumption (Porter, 2010). While this is accurate, the scene’s self-reflexive dimension is equally important; Varda’s own presence, her tactile engagement with the potatoes, foregrounds the subjective experience of gleaning and creates a poetic meditation on human attention and care.
The clock scene further develops this reflexivity. In a sequence featuring a large, ornate clock, Varda muses on temporality, memory, and the fleeting nature of experience. The camera lingers on her gestures and expressions, emphasising her perspective as an embodied subject encountering the object world. Scholars argue that this functions primarily as commentary on the passage of time in rural labour practices (Bruzzi, 2006), yet I would contend that it also foregrounds the temporal dimension of the essay film itself: the pacing, pauses, and silences invite viewers to inhabit Varda’s contemplative consciousness, highlighting subjectivity as both method and content.
Finally, the opening scene, in which Varda stands before a monumental painting, positions the filmmaker within a frame of aesthetic reflection. The scene establishes a dialogue between self, artwork, and audience, modelling the essay film’s capacity to interweave personal narrative and intellectual inquiry. Varda’s presence, often speaking directly to the camera or gesturing toward objects, reminds viewers that interpretation is inseparable from subjectivity, a hallmark of the essay film that distinguishes it from observational or expository documentary modes.
Subjectivity and Human-Non-Human Relations
Caroline Porter’s analysis of Varda’s work underscores the filmmaker’s focus on subjectivity and the interrelation of human and non-human entities. In Gleaners and I, Varda treats discarded objects, landscapes, and agricultural detritus as subjects with agency, inviting reflection on human perception and ethical responsibility. This approach positions Varda’s self not as a detached observer but as a participant in a network of interactions that includes non-human actors, such as the potatoes, metal scraps, or the natural environment.
Forceville’s semiotic framework further illuminates Varda’s method of modulating perception. Through framing, composition, and montage, Varda guides the viewer’s attention, creating a sense of intimacy and immediacy with the objects she documents. For example, extreme close-ups of gleaned vegetables, paired with her voice-over reflections, produce a phenomenological effect: the viewer is invited to experience the world from Varda’s embodied perspective. This manipulation of perception demonstrates how the essay film’s form allows for layered, complex engagement with reality, blending factual reportage with poetic and ethical reflection.
Varda’s attention to both human and non-human subjects exemplifies the essay film’s unique capacity to merge personal, social, and environmental concerns. Her subjectivity is not merely a narrative device; it constitutes the lens through which ethical and aesthetic meaning emerges. The film’s depth arises from this interrelation: human experience is inseparable from the material and social world, and the essay film form enables simultaneous reflection on both.
