Too late?

Here is my Gleaners post. I apologize for how late it is!

I saw this documentary as ultimately a film about how individuals resist negative change, not by calling for an end to the corrupt system itself, but by creating new sites of discourse within the structure, ultimately proving that power does not just flow from top to bottom in any given system.

This way of creating new sites of discourse within a structure is what Varda’s film and new media have in common. Both are responding to a revolution: in the gleaners’ case the industrial revolution and in new media’s case technological or digital. In both revolutions, the result seems to be the alienation of humanity as the result of mediation by a new force (machine or digitization). Gleaners and/or new media artists can come together in a post-machine world and reap their own benefit from the new non-human process. There is a sense that both gleaners and new media artists are on the fringe. Working outside of the system, gleaners refuse to participate in capitalism and instead almost revert to a hunting/gathering modus operandi. Working outside the museum/gallery system, many new media artists try to reach audiences directly and avoid the pitfalls of the art market. Ultimately it is this subversive, anti-capitalist drive that unites gleaners and cutting-edge artists.