Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (Agnes Varda, 2000)
"I have the feeling that I'm an animal," Varda muses aloud, "Worse, an animal I do not know."
I can imagine this musing, like the dance of the lens cap that takes place, is made possible only by the fact that this was shot on video rather than film. But why is it exactly that digital video looks so hideous compared to film? What is it that makes it look so terrible? To paraphrase Gorin speaking at the cinematheque, the digital image on the screen is essentially just lines and lines of information that renders an image across a surface in which all the information is equal and ambivalent. The human mind, he says, understands all of this in a fraction of a second and as a result the image in question looks fucking terrible. And film? He says film is the result of a chemical process on a substrate where there is real image information surrounded by nothing. It is the chemical reaction, or the image created by a chemical reaction, that has some warmth to it and also, he said, a ghost behind the image.
Varda's documentary is charming enough to transend video. Like in Eloge de l'amour (2001) or Ten (2002) we have a seasoned director working in video so we can be at least assured that there will be substance and composition.
I really liked all the gleaner mythology. That she using art and legal records traced the practice of gleaning into a centuries old part of French heritage. Her sympathetic portrait of the crusty french dumpster divers was a total coup.
I can imagine this musing, like the dance of the lens cap that takes place, is made possible only by the fact that this was shot on video rather than film. But why is it exactly that digital video looks so hideous compared to film? What is it that makes it look so terrible? To paraphrase Gorin speaking at the cinematheque, the digital image on the screen is essentially just lines and lines of information that renders an image across a surface in which all the information is equal and ambivalent. The human mind, he says, understands all of this in a fraction of a second and as a result the image in question looks fucking terrible. And film? He says film is the result of a chemical process on a substrate where there is real image information surrounded by nothing. It is the chemical reaction, or the image created by a chemical reaction, that has some warmth to it and also, he said, a ghost behind the image.
Varda's documentary is charming enough to transend video. Like in Eloge de l'amour (2001) or Ten (2002) we have a seasoned director working in video so we can be at least assured that there will be substance and composition.
I really liked all the gleaner mythology. That she using art and legal records traced the practice of gleaning into a centuries old part of French heritage. Her sympathetic portrait of the crusty french dumpster divers was a total coup.