Agnès Varda, director of the amazing documentary Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), has a new film out—what appears to be a fantastical, memoir-documentary about her life as a New Wave pioneer, wife and lover of Jacques Demy and all-around badass. Here’s the trailor.
And here’s A.O. Scott‘s piece on the project and its creator. In it, he calls Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse “a personal and philosophical inquiry into the practice of gathering what has been discarded or passed over.” And it is. Because Varda made it. In France. If anyone else had tackled the project, it would have been a movie about freegans and politics and all that is wonky and dull and without the fun of a wacky French/Belgian woman inserting herself into the action as a very present narrator. In short, it would have been no fun at all and noone would remember that in France, they have a crazy law that requires farmers to open their farms up to the public after harvest to collect leftover food. I can’t wait to see what the rest of her life/career was like.
Anyway, since this post is only tangentially trash-related, I’m throwing in this link from a few months back on urban gleaning. Check it out now if you missed it then.
Tags: Agnès Varda, Belgium, France, Freegans, Gleaner, gleaners, gleaning, Jacques Demy, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, New Wave, Nouvelle Vague, The Gleaners and I
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