Gelb Versus Varda

Food is either elegant or inelegant but, either way it is essential to human life. David Gelb’s documentary, “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” and Agnes Varda’s documentary, “The Gleaners and I” take two very different approaches on the topic of food. Gelb’s debut film focuses more on the elegant style of food, while Varda’s film focuses on the inelegant side of food. Gelb’s film focuses on the Sushi chef Jiro and why he is considered the best. His film gives close ups to show the detail and work put in to the preparation of sushi. Varda takes a look at the less exquisite side of food and focuses on the topic of gleaning. Her work shows more of nature’s food. She looks at fresh food picked right from the fields and bushes. No preparation just food. Both films introduce a foreign culture to Americans. Gelb’s film centers on Japanese culture and Varda’s film centers on French culture. Varda chooses to

Varda is an interlocutor who interviews gleaners in the film. Her conversation is with mostly the elderly. Her attempts to humor the audience is specific to a certain audience not with a general audience. With a younger audience such as me the conversation seems boring and I often drift away from the film. She has a conversation with this elderly couple that describe to her how they met. While watching this I question what was the purpose of incorporating this into the film? They were all laughing yet I found nothing amusing about what they said. The addition to the film seemed pointless and irrelevant. As the amateur Ms. Varda travels across France she captures and incorporates weird and unimportant scenes to her film. Scenes such as describing her old hand, talking about the water stains on her ceiling, capturing cars with her hand while on the road, have no relevance. Ms. Varda certainly has a wild and vivid imagination but constantly goes off topic in her film. Time uses for her babbling could have been used for a more in-depth exploration of the topic of