The Gleaners and I.

When watching Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, (Agnes Varda 2000) I found the experience insightful, interesting but also incredibly sad. Varda enters French country side and cities armed with her hand-held camera in search of ‘gleaners’, members of the community who use what others waste. This is usually food, sometimes TV’s and fridges etc.

Varda captures many different people in the film, young, old, rich, poor. But what was very striking was that the gleaners were almost always poor and treated as lower class citizens. The film presents very important issue to its audience, that of waste and how members of society or communities are treated because of their chosen, or in fact absolutley necessary lifestyle.

Social rejection is rife in the film. The members of society who ‘glean’ are treated negatively.

With this film I feel Varda can alter your relation between a preconceived idea and the truth. Why is unnecessary waste tollerated? Why are gleaners prosecuted and looked down on? Varda captures the community in a way that puts the average consumer to shame. “Resistance to consumerism.”

Gleaners

I think the film also conveys the material culture of our time. The gleaners in the film are living in a different world, and the dominant belief system that is operating is that of a consumerist culture driven by capitalism.

Food is made unobtainable for those who need it most, even though it is only to reside in a bin. And the harsh laws that deal with gleaning reiterate the way it is not a socially accepted activity.

Consumption and Production.

Dogtown and Z-boys was a great film. Directed by Stacy Peralta (2002) you can’t help but get drawn in by the soothing tones of narrator Sean Penn and the vintage style the film adopts aesthetically. The film was mostly shot in sunny California and you can almost feel the heat from the screen. I really enjoyed the escapism style of film making and the chance to experience a little piece of the subculture that the skaters and surfers of the 70’s made so popular today.

Skating a drained pool

The Zephyr surf team featured on the film were the first group to take surfing to the streets when they discovered skateboarding. Their effortless style and low, flowing skating technique was to them, like surfing the concrete. To most, the skateboard was just another commodity, but skating and surfing went hand in hand and was more than just a hobby. They had created a youth subculture.

Marx states that a commodity is an “external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind.” Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1.

When Marx uses the term commodity he also uses it closley with the term use-value. However, something that has use-value does not always mean it is a commodity.

“He who satisfies his own need with the product of his own labour admittedly creates use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values”. (131)

The commodity therefore has a natural form and a value form.

Under capitalism the exchange-value is more important than the use-value of something, so skating brands such as, Vans or Etnis are selling commodities. But is it fair to say that the Z-boys of Dogtown were subverting this notion? They did indeed buy into the commodity of a skateboard to satisfy their needs, but admittedly built their’s from old cupboards or doors for the love of the sport. Stacy described skating as “an athletic stream of consciousness.”

Some of the Zephyr team did however enter the business world, becoming involved with advertising and creating skating equipment and merchandise. And these brands can be criticised for making money rather than providing something entirely useful for people.

Culture as Commodity

Culture is becoming more and more commodified, and it is all about profit. People should not have to pay ridiculous prices to see a film or a play (something that is the product of human thought or creativity) but artistic value is usually secondary to the exchange-value of a product. An example of this is the Lost series. The series was supposed to run for only one series but continued to run for six as there was more money to be made. Culture shouldn’t be a commodity.

Commodity fetishism is the tendency to attribute towards commodities. Could the remake of the Dogtown and Z-boys documentary into a feature film adhere to this notion? Peralta gained funding (400,000 dollars) from Vans to make his film. But what was the need to create a Hollywood remake, Lords of Dogtown? More money?

Affect…?

In week one our Film and Media class was faced with the term, affect. My initial thought was that ‘affect’ was just the way in which you are affected by something and the way it affects everything around you, be it culture or society. Jeremy Gilbert writes, ‘To think affect is to think the social.’ So perhaps it is not simply how you are affected but but also how something relates to your society and every body elses. Affect then, is not merely feelings but reflections and consequences.

To me ‘affect’ relates to the engagement between subjects and texts.

Jan Svankmajer. Food.

The first film we have been shown is Food, by Jan Svankmajer (1992). The film is in three parts, breakfast,lunch and dinner.

The film uses food and eating habbits as a metaphor to approach political and social values.

Breakfast depicts the human as a machine, the repetative nature of the characters and their robotic sounds and movements perhaps allude to the thought of modern society being very mechanical. Mechanical in our day to day lives, and also in our work-ethic. Do we work like machines? The idea of consumerism is also relevant. The way the characters devour their breakfasts one after another, with a seemingly endless line of customers outside waiting to do the same  reiterates this theme.

Lunch was a very interesting part of the film. My initial thought was that of the rich-poor divide. The two main characters are clearly from different social backgrounds and we see the well-mannered rich character devouring the shabbier dressed man’s belongings and then the man himself. The clear class divide portrays the rich man as greedy and unstoppable, taking from the poor man. I also picked up on the theme of eating habbits. The characters respond to the same stiuations differently so we know about their eating habbits. The upper class man uses a knife and fork and has a serviette, but the lower class man eats his ‘food’ without, and in large gulps. This structuralist technique helps us as an audience to learn about the characters.

Dinner was perhaps the strangest part. Some themes we noticed as a class were:

• Attitudes towards consumerism
• You are what you eat
• Consumption and production
• Anti meat
• Cultural differences

What effect do you get as you watch this scene? Squeamish, horrified, confused, intrigued? Maybe all, but what stands out for me is the thought that the characters could be consuming what they value. For example, the athlete who eats his leg and the woman who eats her breasts. Is Svankmajer making his audience think about what they consider important in terms of the body?

 

Theory as Practice.

What is ‘Theory’ and what is ‘Practice’?

The word theory was origionally a technical term meaning “a looking at, viewing or beholding”, and refers to reflecting on rather than to act upon. Practice, is usually described as a method of learning and of acquiring experience. When concerned with the Film and Media course, Theory as Practice to me, means obtaining knowledge of specific areas, topics and theories to do with the media and utilising this knowledge to broaden our understanding of different types of media, and the way in which we read these.