Author:

Keywords:

rhetorical invention, documentaries, Agnès Varda

Abstract:

‘The gleaners and I’, is a special, award-winning documentary on the topic of poverty and the economy of overconsumption realized by Agnès Varda in 2000. Far from dividing her subjects into (groups of) winners and losers, or criminals and victims, Varda creates a playful and insightful interaction between herself and her ‘collection’ of characters: traditional and actual gleaners of all sorts, artists, salespeople, lawyers, farmers, a famous psychiatrist, and so on. The alert, merry and empathic narrator tells how her accidental encounters with marginal gleaners lead her to ever new interesting places and situations she can take along in her story. Also the act of filming, including filming her own wrinkled hand during her long rides through the French countryside, is taken along in the process, as well as other elements of subjectivity such as her memories, her house, or her visits to musea or artists where she keeps discovering more artifacts on the topic of collecting throwaways of all kinds. Her personal interaction and involvement with various people who don’t participate in the consumption economy create new perspectives far beyond conventional frames of pity or indignation. In this documentary, an important social and economic phenomenon is brought up, as well as the question of how to present this topic, how to look at it, how to gather and arrange the material. In times of increasing populism, rationality should not be abandoned, but at the same time a more subjective appeal to deeper human common grounds should be handled. When trying to change hegemonic and polarizing perspectives, the challenge of creating new (verbal and visual) discourses is not reserved for artists. Rhetoricians can study and show how the quest for new perspectives is a matter of creative invention.