拾穗者

作者：Larissa Pham

译者：覃天

校对：易二三

来源：标准收藏（2021年11月12日）

【本文首发于《虹膜》公众号】

At the end of February of 2020, I watchedThe Gleaners and Iwith my boyfriend at BAM. It was, I thought, an ordinary day. We bought tickets in advance because we knew the small theater’s screenings always sell out; I thought I would be cold inside, but I had my coat, so it was okay. It was the first Agnès Varda I’d ever seen, but I knew it was a favorite of my partner’s. Eleven days later, the city locked down.

2020年2月底，我和男友在布鲁克林音乐学院（BAM）的影厅里看了《拾穗者》。我想，这原本可能只是平凡的一天。我们知道BAM小厅的票经常很快就卖光了，所以提前订了票；我以为影厅里可能会很冷，不过还好我有外套。这是我第一次看瓦尔达的电影，她是我男友最爱的导演。11天后，纽约就进入了封锁状态。

InThe Gleaners and I,Varda sets out to make a documentary about the lives of gleaners and scavengers she encounters in the cities and countryside of France. Along the way she gets pleasurably lost in the details. Scenes spin off scenes until the whole film is less a straightforward narrative than an accumulation of experiences. On a trip to visit a field where gleaners pick over potatoes that have been missed by the harvesting machine, Varda is invited to choose her own. “The heart, the heart, I want the heart,” Varda cries, reaching for a misshapen potato, its two halves bifurcated like the atria of a heart. There she discovers a pile of rejects: the oddly formed produce can’t be sold at the grocery store. Varda immediately films the potatoes up close with her handheld camera, recording unsteadily with one hand while gleaning heart-shaped potatoes with the other. Then she takes them home and films them again, the lens lingering over their mottled, thin-skinned surfaces.

《拾穗者》是瓦尔达拍摄的一部纪录片，她将镜头对准了在法国城市和农村遇到的那些拾荒者。一路上，瓦尔达愉快地迷失在遇到的每一个细节中。一个接一个的场景接连呈现，这让观众觉得整部电影与其说是一个直截了当的叙述，不如说是瓦尔达旅行经验的积累，在其中的一个片段中，瓦尔达被邀请去参观一块农田，那里的拾荒者正在捡那些收割机遗漏掉的土豆，她被邀请去挑选一些。「心形的土豆，我想要一个心形的土豆，」瓦尔达激动地说道，伸手摸了摸一个畸形的土豆，它左右两瓣的形状的确很像心脏。在农田里，她发现了很多没有人要的土豆——形状奇特的土豆在杂货店里是卖不出去的。瓦尔达立即用手持摄影机近距离拍下了它们，冒险地用一只手拍摄，另一只手翻寻着心形的土豆。瓦尔达把它们带回了家，再次用镜头拍下了它们，镜头停留在土豆斑驳的外皮上。

Much ofThe Gleaners and Iis shot with this same small handheld camera, the lens panning over surfaces, zooming in and out. The camera is “stroboscopic, narcissistic, hyperrealistic,” Varda intones. The imagery it captures becomes an ode to the specificity of what is seen and observed by an individual—it’s the polar opposite of hypnotic, bodiless drone footage. Watching Varda’s film, we ride along with her, seeing what she sees, hearing what she hears. As she makes sense of the world she witnesses, she passes it on to us, the audience, shaped by her singular perspective. “There is another woman gleaning in the film; it’s me,” she declares. The gleaners glean potatoes, apples, parsley, and oranges on the street. Like skimming cream off the top of milk—or perhaps surfing on a wave, emerging smoothly above the frothy sea—Varda gleans their stories, capturing them in lovingly compiled footage.

《拾穗者》大部分的画面都是用小型手持摄影机拍摄的，这使得镜头可以轻易地移动，放大和缩小画面。这款摄影机「有着频闪观测仪的效果，有点自我陶醉的意味，它们甚至还可以是一个小的宣传员。」影片里瓦尔达的旁白说道。它的轻便和灵动赋予了个人视角更多的意义，而和那些宏大、刻板的镜头截然不同。瓦尔达的电影让观众跟随着她的视角，见她所见，听她所听。瓦尔达将她看见的世界通过影像传递给了观众，我们被她带有悲悯心的视角感动。她说：「电影里还有一个女人在拾荒，那就是我。」拾荒者在街道旁捡着别人不要的土豆、苹果、欧芹和橙子。如同撇掉牛奶上的一层奶泡，或是在平稳的海面上冲浪一样，瓦尔达用镜头柔软地记录下了这些瞬间。

When I love someone, I eat what they eat. I sleep in their bed; I wear their clothes. I collect the detritus of our relationship, secreting it in corners of my apartment where I can see it all the time: scribbled notes, ticket stubs, a metal lapel clip from the museum in Mexico City. These things I’ve gleaned remind me that love exists and that I am loved.

当我爱一个人的时候，我会吃他爱吃的东西。我睡在他们的床上，穿着他们的衣服。我将那些和我们生活有关的碎片收起起来，藏在公寓的角落，因此我随时都能看到它们了：潦草的便条、票根、来自墨西哥城博物馆的一个金属翻领夹。我收集到的这些东西会提醒我，爱是存在的，我是被爱的。

InThe Gleaners and I,there’s a moment where Varda arrives home from a trip abroad. “For me and my poor memory, returning from a journey, it’s what I have gleaned that tells me where I’ve been,” she narrates, over a montage of her pulling out souvenirs from an unzipped suitcase. Her keepsakes from Japan are lovably kitschy: postcards of Edo-period woodcuts, brightly colored loofahs, a fabric banner decorated with amaneki-neko（招财猫）for good luck. When I think of this moment, I want to tell Varda: Yes, I’m the same way. I’m forgetful too.

在《拾穗者》中的一个场景里，瓦尔达刚刚从国外旅行回来。「对于我和我糟糕的记忆来说，从旅行归来的时候，那些我收集到的东西会告诉我自己去过哪些地方，」她边从行李箱边拿出纪念品时说。她从日本带回来的纪念品非常俗气：江户时代木刻的明信片，色彩鲜艳的丝瓜布，带有象征好运的招财猫的布旗。当我看到这个场景时，我想告诉瓦尔达：是的，我也是这样。我也很健忘，需要它们的存在来唤醒自己的过去。

I should explain that I’m not really a movie person. At all, in fact. It’s not that I don’t like movies; I’m actually convinced that moving-image media is the pinnacle of art, combining everything that’s good about everything. But I’m terrible at watching things on my own. There’s something about the total surrender of a movie-viewing experience—the need to devote two hours of focused energy; the overwhelming synthesis of sound, visuals, and narrative—that frightens me, makes me fear I’ll feel too much. I’m always trying to mediate my experience. I’ll read the plot summary; I turn on subtitles to give me something concrete to follow.

我应该解释一下，我并非一个电影人。事实上，我的生活和电影一点也没有关系。并不是我不喜欢电影；我觉得电影是一门杰出的艺术，它融合了一切美好的东西。但我不擅长独自来看一部电影。完全沉浸的观影体验——需要投入两个小时的集中精力；声音、视觉和叙事压在一起，这让我害怕，让我担心自己的感受会过多。我总是试图和我的经历和解。我会阅读剧情梗概，打开字幕，这些具体的东西让我觉得可靠。

But I’ve learned to love cinema—not just in theory, as a would-be art critic, but in practice. In the experience of watching, letting a film unfold. As the city locked down and the theaters closed, my partner and I retreated, like so many others, to the interior. During the day, we biked, crisscrossing Brooklyn to try every bánh mì the borough had to offer. At night, we watched movies together, huddled in his apartment:Burning, Clouds of Sils Maria,the entireLord of the Ringstrilogy, pausing during the Battle of Helm’s Deep to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.Chungking Expressand Kieślowski’sThree Colors.In that space, our lockdown universe of two, I learned to be patient. To be as still as the glacial, slow-motion beginning ofMelancholia.To be as curious about life and its infinite, infinitely developing stories as Agnès Varda.

但我已经学会了如何热爱电影——不仅是在理论上，作为一名未来的艺术评论家，来热爱它，而且在观影时也是如此。在观影时，让一部电影慢慢展开。随着城市的封锁和剧院的关闭，我和男朋友像其他许多人一样宅在家里。白天，我们骑着自行车，穿梭于布鲁克林，去尝我们能买到的每一种越南特色的三明治。晚上，我们窝在公寓里一起看电影：《燃烧》《锡尔斯玛利亚》《指环王》三部曲，在看到第二部的时候停下来去做花生奶油和果冻三明治，我们还看了《重庆森林》和基耶夫斯洛夫斯基的《蓝白红三部曲》。我们就像世界上仅剩的两个人，我学会了保持耐心。我们的生活像《忧郁症》中开场的慢动作一样静止了，我们像瓦尔达一样对生命及其无限发展的故事充满好奇心。

Varda’s film was inspired by witnessing gleaners on the streets of Paris stooping to pick up produce left over from markets. Her subjects include people who are frequently poor and unhoused, and who turn to gleaning out of necessity, whether to find food or to salvage materials, like scrap copper, to sell. Throughout the film it’s clear that gleaning is an act of necessity, but when we expand its definition, as Varda attempts, we see it’s also an act of love. It’s picking up what has escaped notice, paying attention to the fruit left on the vine. Late in the film, Varda turns her attention to a group of gleaners who dumpster-dive, gathering up food that’s near its sell-by date, cooking enormous meals before the meat goes bad. There are trayfuls of rabbit, stacks of chicken thighs. When Varda exclaims that they’ll be eating meat for weeks, one of the gleaners answers: “We always find someone to share it with.”

《拾穗者》的灵感来自于瓦尔达目睹巴黎街头的拾荒者弯腰捡市场上的剩菜。她的拍摄对象包括那些经常穷困潦倒、无家可归的人，他们为了寻找食物或回收废铜等材料来出售，都是出于生存而寻找食物的人，她的研究对象包括那些经常无家可归的人，他们出于必要而求助于收集食物或回收废铜等材料来出售。在整部电影中，拾荒显然是一种必要的行为，但当我们放大它的定义时，就像瓦尔达试图做到的那样，我们看到这也是一种和爱有关的行为。《拾穗者》提醒着我们那些被我们遗忘的细节，提醒我们留意挂在藤蔓上的水果。在电影的后半部分，瓦尔达将注意力转向了一群捡垃圾的人，他们收集快要过期的食物，在肉变质之前做一顿饭菜。有一盘盘的兔肉，成堆的鸡腿。当瓦尔达惊呼他们要吃几个星期的肉时，其中一个拾荒者回答说：「我们总能找到可以分享的人。」

Varda’s gaze throughout the film is a loving one. A camera is an intrusion, but it also elevates: she meets her subjects, human and non-, with kindness. We see what she sees, which is also what she wants us to see,（上面出现了这句话，没有翻了）as she zooms in, panning over humble cabbages, heavy-headed sunflowers. A patch of mold from a water leak, spreading on the ceiling and into the wall, is reconfigured through her lens, becoming “a Tàpies, a Guo-Qiang, a Borderie.” We return to the heart-shaped potatoes, now sprouting and growing moldy too. But we stay, held by Varda’s interest. It is important to her, so it becomes important to us too.

如上所言，整部电影中瓦尔达的凝视充满了爱意。摄影机似乎变成了入侵者，但它也带来了升华感：瓦尔达对她的拍摄对象，无论是人类还是事物，都怀着友好的态度。她放大镜头，翻找着不起眼的卷心菜和向日葵。一块漏水的霉菌蔓延到天花板和墙壁上，通过她的镜头重新配置下都被赋予了新的意义。我们又看到了心形的土豆，现在正在发芽，也在发霉。但我们被瓦尔达的兴趣吸引，这些对她非常重要的事物使我们产生了共鸣。

This is my relationship to cinema—I want to love the things the person I love loves. And it is my relationship to love: because I love someone, I want to try to love what he loves. When I first watchedThe Gleaners and I,that day at BAM, I was paying extra attention. I wanted to love it the way my partner loved it, because I wanted to understand something about him. Varda’s film echoes this phenomenon of mine—it presents the idea that gleaning is a way of making use of something, of appreciating something that someone else has made use of. Of coasting beside it and learning why it’s useful, or beautiful, or full of potential. Maybe I’m a gleaner, too, in the way that I love—I’m always picking things up, scraping, incorporating them into my own life as a way of trying to understand someone else.

这就是我与电影的关系——我想和我爱的人分享相同的东西。这也是我与爱的关系：因为我爱一个人，我想试着去爱他所爱。我格外珍视自己在BAM看《拾穗者》的经历。我想要像男友一样去爱这部电影，因为我想更多地了解他。瓦尔达的电影与我的想法不谋而合——它呈现了这样一种理念：即拾荒是一种利用东西的方式，是欣赏别人利用过的东西的一种方式，默默地在一旁观察它为什么有用，为何如此美丽，或充满潜力。也许我也是一个拾荒者——我喜欢把东西捡起来，收集起来，融入到我自己的生活中，作为一种试图理解别人的方式。

My favorite parts ofThe Gleaners and Iare Varda’s stray observations, the ones that arrive between moments or scenes. Language accumulates throughout the film, just like it does in a relationship. Driving through the countryside, Varda notices the large trucks that barrel down the highway, passing her car. She places her hand in front of the window, index finger and thumb forming a circle, framing each passing truck. Later, on another drive, Varda repeats the gesture, like an inside joke we now share. But then she closes her hand into a fist, winking the huge trucks out of sight. “I’d like to capture them,” she says. “To retain things passing? No, just to play.” But we know that she wants to keep them too—that’s what her other hand is doing in the recording of it, the camera on.

电影中我最喜欢的部分是瓦尔达的流浪观察，也就是在某些瞬间或场景中展现的部分。语言在整部电影中不断堆积，就像在一段感情中一样。在乡间行驶时，瓦尔达注意到在高速公路上驶过的大卡车从她的车旁驶过。她把手放在车窗前，食指和大拇指形成一个圆圈，框住每辆经过的卡车。后来，在另一条路上，瓦尔达重复了这个手势，但随后她把那些消失在道路尽头的卡车握在了手心。「我想抓住它们，」她说。「留住过去的事情吗？不，只是玩玩而已。」但我们知道她也想留着它们——这就是她的另一只手正在做的事情，那就是开着摄影机拍摄。

Midway through the film, while visiting a vineyard, where a family of gleaners is gathering grapes left on the vine, Varda accidentally leaves her camera on. The lens cap, dangling, dances, swaying and twirling above a background of dry grass and yellow leaves. Tickled by the footage, Varda keeps it in the film, setting it to a jazzy background. There’s a playfulness to it, a joy in the tiniest of things.

在电影的中段，在参观葡萄园时，拾荒者一家正在收集藤蔓上剩下的葡萄，瓦尔达无意中没有关上摄影机。镜头盖晃荡着，在干草和黄叶构成的背景上舞动着，摇摆着，旋转着。瓦尔达被这段画面逗笑了，将它放在了电影中。它有一种趣味性——即便最微小的事情里都有一种快乐。

Waiting for the train the other day, my phone camera turned on in my bag. I picked it up to let my boyfriend know I was running late and saw that it had been recording. When I played it back, I saw snatches of black—the inside of my bag—and flashes of metallic white as the lens bumped against my water bottle. The flickering video, a minute and thirty seconds long, looked on the verge of abstract, turning into full-fledged realism as the frame moved out of my bag, panning over the platform edge, my shoe, then blue sky. Rather than delete it, I saved the video. I wanted to share it with the person I love, a message in the shared language of the thing we both lovetoo.

前几天在等火车的时候，我包里的手机摄像头自己打开了。我想要拿起手机，告诉男友自己快迟到了，却发现手机打开着，一直在录音。当我回放视频的时候，我看到镜头在包里拍下的黑色画面，以及镜头撞到我的水瓶上时泛起的白光。这段闪烁的视频时有1分30秒，看起来就像是一件抽象艺术作品。当我从包里拿出手机时，它的画面开始变得现实起来，记录下了火车站台、我的鞋子和蓝天。我没有删除它，而是留了下来。我想和我爱的人分享它，一条我们都能看得懂的和爱有关的信息。