This afternoon I re-watched parts of Les glaneurs et la glaneuse.
I especially wanted to watch the man who caught Varda’s attention because he was always eating (toujours mangeant) as he gleaned the leftovers from city markets. (And to give you an idea of how primitive my knowledge of French is, I had to look it up because I didn’t know anything about that form of manger. And who knows, without the English subtitles I might have missed it altogether.)
He’d go along, picking through thrown-out food, and stuffing his mouth as he worked. Some greens went straight from the sidewalk to his mouth. But he also impressed Varda because when she finally got to talking to him, she learned that he was very conscious of the specific nutritional qualities of what he was eating, which he says came about because he had a Masters degree in biology and had been an “assistant instructor.”
It is never explained why he now makes a small living selling magazines and newspapers on the sidewalk at the train station, instead of having a teaching job. But it was just plain enjoyable to watch him at his teaching gig. He lives in a shelter in which he said 50 percent of the people are illiterate. A lot of them are immigrants from Senegal and Mali. He teaches them to read, putting in a couple hours a day, students coming and going as they please. He is outside the school system, so it’s just volunteer work for him.
It was fascinating to watch as he did a word study with his students on the word “success.” One of them asked if it meant like Céline Dion. He agreed it was a good example. (I just now looked up some information about her life story on Wikipedia, and understand better why she came to mind.) But the joy of interaction between students and teacher in this and in other word studies makes one re-think that word “success,” and assign it a bigger meaning.