Worse than paradise - The Gleaners and I at Bertha Dochouse

Alice Haworth-Booth — 2016-01-04T11:10:32Z

Between 1999 and the year 2000, Agnès Varda took a digital camera around France filming gleaners – “glaner,” Varda's voiceover says over shots of the encyclopaedia entry, “to gather after the harvest.” The original gleaners, made famous in rustic paintings of the 19th century, gathered left-over corn; in Varda's film we meet the specialist gatherers of unwanted potatoes, grapes, furniture, fridges, parsley, dolls and oysters. In other hands they may have been categorised as scavengers or dumpster-divers – but the term gleaner has a magic to it, rightfully placing Varda's marginalised interviewees in a noble tradition.

As the film unfolds, gleaners from all over France charm us, make us laugh, teach us and encourage us think. This is Varda's gift. “I put a lot of energy to make them look good, express clearly things, including the pain, the hassle, the difficulty to live, to eat,“ she said in an interview in Indiewire in 2001. Life is hard, but Varda finds true delight everywhere, and not of a glib, inspirational variety. She has a fun streak a mile wide. She interviews a lawyer in his robes in the middle of a field, asking him whether the law which enshrines gleaning as a right for those in need also covers those who glean for pleasure. “If they glean for fun, it's because they have a need of fun,” he answers. In another scene, Varda films the mould on her ceiling by way of greeting it after a trip away. She's come to like it, she says – why not appreciate it the way one would a tapestry in a museum? “You can always make something look different. Which is a way of saying that I'm, in a way, protected from being unhappy,” Varda said of the mould scene.

Beauty and humour are so prized by Varda that occasionally the film appears to veer off-topic, but these interludes also serve their purpose in a film that is wide-ranging and profound but short at 78 minutes and as light and quick as the digital camera it's filmed on. A couple sit outside a bar telling us their funny and lopsided love story, in between explaining the difference between gleaning (stooping to pick up) and picking that which descends. So Varda gleans a good story, and makes us care about the lives of people we might not have thought we were interested in. She is curious, compassionate and non-judgmental, and uses her own charm not only to be invited into the lives of the people she interviews but in front of the camera, too, clownishly confronting her greying hair and liver-spotted hands in scenes which turn out to be their own profound meditation on ageing.

Moving from a story about the complexities of waste in agriculture (where some farmers welcome gleaners as part of the ecological system, and others ward them off in protection of their profits), the film goes on to consider the use of ‘cute, clean' rubbish in children's workshops and high art, and the compulsion of some gleaners to collect and create. “I like dolls, they're my system,” says the Russian bricklayer, Bodan Litnanski, who has created a palace of totem poles out of things found at the dump. “He's an amateur,” says his wife, “we can't stop him. We let him.” One artist shows Varda a map, which he says is provided by the council to show people when and where they can collect other people's junk. “I think they're actually printed to show where to dump things” Varda gently interjects. The Gleaners and I is radical in its turning of waste on its head. Gleaners become lords of the town, the generous sharers of fantastical bounty. Varda doesn't tell us that this is how things should be, or if not, what things should be like, but lets us make something out of the stories she collects.

Pasolini

Alice Haworth-Booth — 2015-09-01T10:06:10Z

Abel Ferrara's Pasolini opens in the dark: the Italian director is interviewed in French, in sunglasses, in a smoky room, in 1975, about Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which is the last film he will make. Pier Paolo Pasolini appears suave and patient with the questions (‘Sex is political?' ‘Naturalmente'). His face is deeply serious, furrowed, and unsmiling, with just a ripple of knowingness running across his chiselled jaw. Willem Dafoe, brilliantly cast in the title role, is a perfect picture of gravitas.

Pasolini's life is briefly but masterfully illuminated by Ferrara before it is snuffed out. The film follows the last hours of his life before he is murdered, the night after the interview takes place, for being gay or a socialist, or both (the verdict has always been contested). At the time of his death Pasolini was not only preparing Salò for release, but writing a novel, planning his next film, and thinking a lot about radical politics. Ferrara's biopic is a fictional montage which takes us far beyond Pasolini's last hours, and is as much about Pasolini's imagined worlds as about the one he lived and died in. Scenes from life (the apartment he shared with his mother, the streets of Rome at night) are spliced with filmic fragments which could be snippets from the novel, scenes from unmade films, parts of articles, dreams or memories. In one early scene he draws the earth surrounded by other planets, a storyboard which later comes to life as a big papier-mache globe spinning in a studio. If the earth becomes a kitsch play-thing, it's because Pasolini is trying to understand it and imagine it to be better.

We're introduced to Pasolini's socialist radicalism in another interview, this one with La Stampa on the evening he died, and used in the film verbatim. If you had a magic wand that could make everything you're fighting against disappear, the interviewer says, would you use it? He implies that without the struggle (as well, I guess, as the structures he purports to want to dismantle) Pasolini would lose everything: his art, his intellectual activity, and maybe even the shiny furniture of his Rome apartment. Pasolini replies that not only would he use the magic wand, but that it exists. It's the hammer which, if struck enough times, brings down a house. What will he be left with? “I will be left with everything. Indeed, I will be left with myself.” If Ferrara's film seems full, I think this is the effect he's going for - Pasolini hitting that hammer again and again and again to create change and to get closer to the self (successfully or not).

Moving from Pasolini's sombre ‘European intellectual' personality to the sweeter, richer world of his creative output, we find ourselves in a real and dirty fantasy land, utopian in its way. We're suddenly in an unfinished Pasolini film, partially of Abel Ferrara's own invention, where the real Pier Paolo's former lover and regular star Ninetto Davoli plays Epifanio, now no sex symbol but just as jolly as ever. In Epifanio's crumbling Rome apartment, the music is loud and joyful as he makes coffee, pisses, and has a booming conversation with his buxom wife who is at least one, maybe several, rooms away. Epifanio and a young friend (named Ninetto, played by a Davoli-esque Riccardo Scamarcio) follow a Messianic star to Sodom, where they are abundantly smiled and winked at, and see its lesbian and gay citizens make a subversion out of straightness in a fantastical ritual to procreate. This is the exuberant heart of Ferrara's film and, it seems, of Pasolini's life: it's all about making the magic happen. There is certainly a wide gulf between the innocence of these characters and Pasolini's own troubling attitudes and actions, but it seems his life ends in a vacuum of the imagination, at the hands of people unable to accept a vision of another world. We're lucky to have a window on Pasolini's vision through his films and writing, and have Ferrara to thank for reminding us to look.

Dir. Abel Ferrara, 2014

Pasolini opens in the UK on 11 September 2015 at the ICA, HOME Manchester, QFT Belfast and selected cinemas UK-wide, and launching on BFI Player. At BFI Southbank, Ciné Lumière and other West End sites from 18 September.

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Worse than paradise - The Gleaners and I at Bertha Dochouse

Pasolini