Agnès Varda is a fantastic director. I haven’t yet seen Cléo de 5 à 7, but I have seen her 2000 film, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, which documents gleaning. Gleaning is the act of picking up the refuse and leftovers after a field has been harvested. There is also urban gleaning which is easy to see in New York City - for example, after the Union Square Greenmarket. Gleaning is completely legal on private, commercial farmland in France. There is also a tradition of hunters being allowed to hunt on certain sections of private land. This may be hard to understand from an American perspective where property rights are sacrosanct, but, given France’s history of a landed aristocracy, it is easy to see why property-users are sometimes privileged over property-owners. I quite like it.

Jean-François Millet’s 1857 painting, Des Glaneuses. It’s one of my favorite works. I gave my father a print a few years ago.