Documenting the Rural: The French Rural Landscapes of Agnès Varda's Documentaires

Agnès Varda’s oeuvre is evidence of her keen and lasting interest for France’s changing rurality. This paper contrasts the approach to ruralities she has taken over the last two decades through a comparative analysis of her documentary films Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) and Visages Villages (Faces, Places, 2017), drawing parallels between the ways in which she addresses the loss of local foodways in one and the loss of local livelihoods in the other. The paper further highlights how, through documentary filmic techniques, Varda reevaluates rural lifeworlds by offering complex portraits of communal and personal spaces in the globalized order, enrolling people and places in telling the stories and memories of the rural, while at the same time inviting a deeply personal yet universalizing reflection on vagabond living, decay, aging and mortality, at the center of which stands the auteur herself.