Watching “The Gleaners & I” made me relive almost every other documentary we had watched this semester thus far. It seemed to be almost every mode of filmmaking, storytelling we had observed. It was abstract with some of its shots and filmmaker decisions (such as the camera cap dance sequence) as well as with Agnes Varda playing with the capability of her hands and their role in playing with objects around her. These elements made me think of “The Man with a Movie Camera” when Vertov decided to also place himself within the film as well as play with shape and distance. I could compare the film to any and every documentary; it was so varied and full of artistic examples.
But, comparing it only to reflexive, there is a lot to look at as well. Starting with Trihn Ti Mihn-ha’s “Sur Name Viet Given Name Nam,” which was a struggle of the female experience of being Vietnamese and being devotional to your husband or devotional to your country (civil rights). The film is reporting, but more than that it is constructing. Nichols writes that the film plays with “how we represent the historical world as well as to what gets represented” (194). The reflexive mode seeks to question or even challenge our own ideas about the historical world. In “Sur Name,” Mihn-ha asks us, “What do we really know about the female Vietnamese experience?”
Similarly, “The Gleaners & I” challenges its viewers by switching back and forth between diaristic scenes, in which Varda tells us why she is filming a particular way or even talks to us as if we are a very close friend or an open diary, and more informative scenes in which she interviews gypsies, biology professors, and vineyard owners alike. The moments of the film in which Varda implements herself and her quirky way of thinking show the true, defining factor of performative mode which is the existence of affect. Films in these modes seek to affect us and raise questions about our what we know or what we don’t know, even. In this sense, reflexive and performative are alike. They both like to play with how reality is perceived. This subjective form of filmmaking allows filmmakers to create works that are personal yet also open.