3 ms·

I love Varda so I’ll bite. Off the top of my head, her most HN-relevant movie is The Gleaners and I. In France, there’s a right to glean — to harvest food that

I love Varda so I’ll bite. Off the top of my head, her most HN-relevant movie is The Gleaners and I. In France, there’s a right to glean — to harvest food that will not otherwise be harvested. (Actual French people should help explain that better.) Varda made a movie about gleaners, which covers everything from people living without a home to people making art from found objects to herself. It’s HN-relevant because finding usefulness in seemingly useless material has the hacker nature. It’s also HN-relevant because she used a new fangled digital camera and it’s absolutely wonderful watching a master director explore what she can do with new technology. She was always enthused about working with technical constraints. One of her lesser movies, Daguerréotypes, was a documentary about the street she lived on. She was pregnant when she made it, so her limitation was the 300 foot long power cables for her equipment. Varda is also one of the few directors I know who loves postmortems. Both the movies I mentioned above have sequels revisiting their topics and discussing how the act of making those movies affected the people who were observed. She also revisited her own life with two late career retrospectives, and her husband Jacques Demy’s career with a biopic, a retrospective on his overall life, and a specific retrospective about one of his movies. She was above all else an observer of life. I recommend her work highly. It’s easily available on the Criterion Channel and much of it is on Kanopy, free with a US library card.

wazoox 3y ago
The right to glean dates back to Antiquity, and is explicitly allowed in France since the Middle Ages. Basically after the harvest, some grain and small batches of straw will always remain, and are explicitly allowed to be gleaned by anyone caring to do so. It's also generally allowed to pick up dead wood in forests (even private ones) as long as it's fallen to the ground. Ditto mushrooms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning
- BrandoElFollito 3y ago
  In France this extends to urban areas where there are groups of people gleaning unsold supermarket goods. This was historically a problem (to the point where in the 80's whatever was unsold was actively made uneatable, I do not remember what the reason was - at least for agricultural unsold goods there was something about getting a refund from the state). Then it became more widespread, where some supermarkets put the unsold (but still good) stuff in clean trashbins. They had to formally throw it away for some tax reasons. I think this restriction was abolished because I see now supermarkets sometimes openly donating these goods, without going through a trashbin.

wazoox 3y ago

The right to glean dates back to Antiquity, and is explicitly allowed in France since the Middle Ages. Basically after the harvest, some grain and small batches of straw will always remain, and are explicitly allowed to be gleaned by anyone caring to do so. It's also generally allowed to pick up dead wood in forests (even private ones) as long as it's fallen to the ground. Ditto mushrooms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning

BrandoElFollito 3y ago
In France this extends to urban areas where there are groups of people gleaning unsold supermarket goods. This was historically a problem (to the point where in the 80's whatever was unsold was actively made uneatable, I do not remember what the reason was - at least for agricultural unsold goods there was something about getting a refund from the state). Then it became more widespread, where some supermarkets put the unsold (but still good) stuff in clean trashbins. They had to formally throw it away for some tax reasons. I think this restriction was abolished because I see now supermarkets sometimes openly donating these goods, without going through a trashbin.