The Gleaners and I, Agnès Varda (France), 2001, 82 min., digital video shown on DVD, French with English subtitles

“The Gleaners and I takes as its subject the act of recovering what had been left behind or thrown away. Gleaning, in Ms. Varda’s expansive definition, encompasses a tradition, a subculture and a vocation. The social history of France and the cruel logic of the consumer economy are refracted through her encounters with fruit pickers, trash collectors and folk artists who devote themselves to gathering what their more complacent, better-off fellow citizens discard…. More profoundly, the gleaners are conservators of human dignity and historical memory.” – A.O. Scott

Ear to the Ground: Art, Politics and Life

The films and videos of Adberrahmane Sissako, Cao Fei and Ou Ning were previously introduced to Electromediascope audiences in two programs of contemporary work from Africa and China. New works by these artists and French filmmaker Agnès Varda integrate social commentary with experimental approaches to video and filmmaking in Ear to the Ground.

These artists are documenting the actions, stories and local resistance by which culturally displaced people are responding to adversely changing living conditions brought about by the forces of industrialization in Europe and China, large-scale urban redevelopment in China and post-colonial chaos in Africa. We experience through different cultural perspectives the resourcefulness, subjective complexity and political responses of people as their rhythms of life and labor collide in the changing seasons and assembly line production cycles of industrial factories and new urban centers. We also encounter multitalented resourceful and capable people who in the face of loss, privation and displacement creatively construct alternative local strategies of critical analysis, resistance and adaptation. These films raise the possibility that with socio-economic and political support, it would be possible to find sustainable solutions that are in harmony with the local experiences and diverse traditions of living in the world. We are situated at a moment in history where indigenous knowledge is both reemerging and disappearing as it comes into conflict with a rapidly developing world of global political and economic change. This knowledge grounded in creative productivity, cultural diversity and human history is valuable to all of us today.

The works of the artists included in Ear to the Ground extend documentary conventions through performative and experimental forms of restaging, using non-actors to play their own professional roles and presenting stories within stories. These processes generate a bottom-up picture paralleling the practices of gleaning, performance and market place debate that metaphorically and actually function quite differently from the way events are framed by global mass media. Their films and video works create an alternative space that is more in keeping with oral and visual forms of literacy and knowledge production that are becoming accessible across multiple cultures and language groups. Their work represents another phase of electronic media directed to a new global audience for art and socio-political content outside the frame of reference provided by electronic mass media. They also function as a critique of the methods of communication and information dispersal of mainstream media that tends to propagate a top-down master narrative point of view similar to the globalized forces that these forms of media report on and from which they are produced. This text-based model of literacy has distanced us and places us in the midst of a special type of alienation that is becoming inadequate for the kind of social intercourse that can respond to the questions of “Where is the future?” and “Whose future is it?” –Patrick Clancy

The Gleaners and I DVD and image stills courtesy of the artist and Zeitgeist Films, New York

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