On the films of Agnès Varda and what she demonstrated about what documentary and fiction have in common.

Varda is one of the few filmmakers who moved between documentary and fiction with equal fluency and who used each mode to think about what the other was capable of. Her fiction films have documentary qualities — real locations, non-professional actors, the texture of observed life. Her documentaries have the structural intelligence of fiction.

The Gleaners and I (2000) is the film where this synthesis is most complete. The film begins as a documentary about people who collect discarded food in French fields, following the tradition of gleaning that is centuries old. It ends as a meditation on the filmmaker's own mortality, her aging hands, the question of what an old woman with a camera is doing in the world.

Varda shot the film on a small digital camera that she used as an instrument of inquiry rather than documentation. She turned the camera on herself constantly: examining her hands, filming the lens cap dangling on its cord, acknowledging her own presence in the act of filming.

This reflexivity is not narcissism. It's honesty: every documentary filmmaker is in the film, and Varda refuses the conventional documentary fiction of the invisible observer.