Documentary creation from an action
——The documentary film "Gleaners" viewing notes
Text/Xiao-Tong
1Start participating in a project
Varda's documentary filming is often accompanied by active participation in another project. For example, in "Beside the Face, Village" which was so popular last year and screened at the Shanghai Film Festival, Varda participated in the photographer JR's personal project on portrait photography. The two took each other to the shooting location of their choice (basically rural and remote places that were not noticed by people), and posted the huge portraits on the local buildings. Varda recorded their experiences along the way: the conversation between the two, random interviews, negotiations with local residents, and portrait work, and even kept interesting fragments of the two torn apart due to disagreements in the film.
The film "Gleaners" started with a picking project. She recorded interviews with pickers and her own life picking. This can be known from the French title of the film, les glaneurs-scavengers, et la glaneuse-and female scavengers.
The project started with a verb glner (gathering and collecting). Varda looked up the definition of the word in the dictionary, traced the relevant regulations from the ancient code, and watched the appearance of the gleaners in Miller's oil painting The Gleaner.
These are clues that can be queried based on the word "picking up", and then through an interesting word game, recording this process is an interesting act.
2 start from the definition
Varda started with an explanation of the act of gleaning, so she met a group of people in the bar who still maintained the ancient tradition of gleaning. They do not regard "picking up" as a simple action. It may be a continuation of tradition and a skill that needs to be learned from the elders. This starting point of Varda is very interesting. She gives a completely different perspective for a behavior that everyone disdains. It's like the definition of the word Glaner, which originally described the action of picking ears in the field, but later it gradually transformed into a common action in modern French: picking and gathering.
According to the original definition of this action, Varda first began to visit a group of people who were picking up fruits and vegetables in the fields.
3 Extension and divergence
Varda extends from Glaneux (euses) in the traditional sense to different picking groups and individuals. They have different needs in different environments with different purposes. People who like picking are accustomed to picking up this action, people who don’t want to waste food pick ingredients from abandoned land, poor people search for food that has just expired or been discarded, and seaside residents pick up fruit trees and oysters in open free picking areas. The author himself also picked out the items he wanted at a glance at the second-hand market and on the roadside, and proceeded layer by layer until the artists collected creative materials and had a very close connection with the divergence after Varda.
After filming these people, the first kind of divergence is the conversation with these scavengers. The manor, the tramp, the chef, the hippie, the teacher... the story behind the picking is almost completely out of the picking, but it is inseparable from the picking.
The second kind of divergence is when the author invites people to play different roles to explain their views.
The third kind of divergence is the link with different arts. The old lady even rapped herself for a while (France is simply a rap paradise in Europe)
Scavengers pick up food or specific abandoned objects, while Varda picks up what they see and feel in life. The final divergence is the author's picking up of art in his life. This conversion from reality to virtual is accumulated from all the previous content. Varda photographed the moldy ceiling of his home, and then added a wooden frame to make it. I created a work of art and used the picked heart-shaped potatoes for an exhibition. Looking back at all the content before the film, it is actually her picking up of the act of "picking up", and all the picking up is assembled into the film "Gleaners".
4 string up pieces
There are many trivial fragments in the film, and some shots will even be treated as waste films by most video workers. But Varda discovered the value of these "scrap films" in her own way. Through the mastery of rhythm, the conversion of montages and the connection of highly literary narration, these pictures show the artistic value of collage. For example, in one shot, the author forgot to close the lens cover of the camcorder, so he took a long picture of the lens cover shaking. Varda helped this "scrap film" find a rhythm and kept it in the film, so she picked up the wonderful moments that belonged to the lens cap. There are many similar trivial shots, and Varda's literary narrative is the key to connecting these fragments. Usually, when we watch a film, especially a documentary, the development of events is the most attention-grabbing. Varda breaks the original storytelling mode of documentaries and adopts a way closer to writing, eliminating even trivialities. The fragments can also be "organically" connected together.
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