The Gleaners and I and the politics of abundance

In France there is a tradition of "gleaning" that allows people to scour fields after harvests and take any left behind crops for their families. Agnès Varda's 2000 masterpiece Les glaneurs et la glaneues (The Gleaners and I) explores abundance and sharing excess through the relationship of this tradition and late 90s dumpster diving or scrounging after open air markets while mixing playful introspection about self and aging.

I was fortunate enough to see this film in the early 2000s while my punk and DIY sensibilities were festering and bubbling to the surface of my psyche. It hit me like a lightning bolt, lining up the potential to share food and resources as a way of life.

Introspections on aging, the dangerous beauty of mold in living spaces and playfulness like trying to capture trucks on the highway with forced perspective really elevate the political with the personal to bring humanity and relatability to massive topics.

Wrapped up in this masterpiece film is the technique of using a handheld digital camera by Varda. In my fictional art house theater, do we run a double feature of this and Lynch's Inland Empire to showcase masters going digital? File it under the "I know how to have fun but not make money" idea cabinet in my mind.

I don't want to run through this film I love beat by beat, but if you have a subscription to criterion channel and have never seen it, throw it on and let me know what you think. Ask yourself about abundance in your life and in your community. What can we do to share resources? What do businesses owe the community for the success we allow them to have under the scourge of capitalism?

Everyone deserves food, everyone deserves a place to live, everyone deserves access to healthcare, everyone deserves access to education. These are not radical thoughts unless we force them in that realm through the propaganda of capitalism that ties our worth to our productivity. Do they owe us a living? Of course they fucking do.

The threads of sharing abundance are a main philosophy in my own life and art, evidenced in my contribution to the lyrics of my band Work Stress's song "Building from Abject Failure:

Let's dismantle this abject failure/Dying and getting sick for a purpose/A purpose for the few, and they're winning/How can we resist and destroy them/We can build a better world based on sharing

Thank you Agnès Varda, for helping articulate what I always knew: we have enough for everyone.