Week 36/2025

With Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), Agnès Varda set out with her digital camera to glean images as others glean potatoes. Playful and tender, the film turns the act of filming into a gesture of touch. “The hand, the hands, my hands. We glean and we pick with our hands. We reach out a hand, we take a hand, we give a hand and lend a hand. There are many hands in the film, including my own – one films, the other does not, one hand looks at the other filming. I have always loved this doubling proper to the filmmaker: to see and to reflect, to be moved and to regulate, to film impromptu and to edit rigorously, to capture disorder and to order it.” The film culminates when Varda films her own aging hand, monstrous and wondrous at once. For her, representation was a way to accept, even to delight in, the passage of time. Varda’s film screens at CINEMATEK in the context of 50 Years Cinélibre – Cinéart. 

In 1994, the French channel Arte invited filmmakers to revisit their adolescence. Claire Denis responded with the rarely screened U.S. Go Home, perhaps her most autobiographical film. Fourteen-year-old Martine (Alice Houri), living near a U.S. military base outside Paris, longs to step into adulthood. At a party, to the sounds of The Animals, Otis Redding, and Chuck Berry, Denis captures the restless mix of desire, awkwardness, and longing that shapes youth. Dancing becomes both intimate and collective ritual, while Martine’s brother (Grégoire Colin) looks on, anticipating the sibling dynamic of Nénette et Boni. Originally part of the omnibus Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge, Denis’s film screens in De Cinema’s summer programme Eternal Summer, Endless Nights.

Also returning to Belgian cinemas is Satyajit Ray’s debut Pather Panchali (1955), released by Lumière in collaboration with Eye Filmmuseum. After the summer revival of Kurosawa restorations, this new release seems only fitting as Kurosawa once said that not having seen the cinema of Ray “means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.”