Agnes Varda made an informal film about the tradition french people have of gleaning food. In a time that everything is done in excess unfortunately gleaning has died down. Cards shows us how this tradition is still practiced a little throughout the countryside and in the metropolitan city. With all the homeless and hungry people that we have stateside I find the practice of gleaning not only necessary to feed forgotten people who don’t have the means to go out and buy “fresh” food from the store but to also put the tons of food that would be discarded due to the superficial outlook that’s so rampant in our society nowadays. I liked that she included different types of gleaning as well as people from different walks of life. With her different examples of people who had to glean for survival as well as those who gleaned for the ethics as well as the pleasure of it she showed that this wasn’t just limited to a certain group of people. I found it odd that although thrifting has become so popular that gleaning food is almost frowned upon. They’re both almost the same thing but thrifting is looked at as cool but gleaning gets the opposite treatment even though it’s a huge part of our history as humans.

While watching the two movies on the same subject matter of the Holocaust, I had two completely different reactions to each. The First film, Night and Fog, I felt almost indifferent to what I was seeing. I think because the film was set up and shot in an informational way I didn’t really take much from it. It was almost the same for me as reading a textbook on the subject matter, which I’ve done so much that it doesn’t seem to phase me anymore. On the other hand the second film, Shoah, affected me more because it was shot with the intention of appealing to your emotions. Hearing first hand accounts from actual survivors and their family members was more personal and allowed me to relate to the atrocities they endured and had to watch their fellow men, women, and children face all at the hand of other human beings. At the end of both movies though I couldn’t help but ask myself, “How could the world watch this and all the other human genocides occur without uttering a word?”