Handiwork

Agnes Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse shows a master filmmaker having fun while also undertaking a deeply personal project, one that confronts death itself.  But the most moving moment for me comes, not during the film itself, but at the end of the “sequel,” a 60-minute follow-up filmed two years after the original.  It had struck me, while watching Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, that Varda’s examinations of her own hands, and of her hair, were reminiscent of her loving close-up explorations of the landscape of Jacques Demy’s body in Jacquot de Nantes.  And in the “sequel,” Varda relates how, in a conversation with someone about Glaneurs, that that person noticed the same connection with Jacquot.  Varda cried, she says, not out of sadness for her late husband, but because she had never noticed that link before.  And I’m paraphrasing a lot here, but Varda makes a point about there being the meanings we intend, and the meanings we don’t.  It is those meanings we communicate, but which are hidden from ourselves, that have the most to say about our lives, and that are the most important for us to hear.