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NCJCF 10 (1) pp. 4561 Intellect Limited 2012
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film Volume 10 Number 1
2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi:
10.1386/ncin.10.1.45_1
KeywordsHarmony Korinewasteethicsaffectnew materialismfeel-bad
cinema
Tina KendallAnglia Ruskin University
Cinematic affect and the ethics of waste
absTraCTThis article considers questions of affect and ethics in
relation to three films about waste: Agns Vardas The Gleaners and I
(1999), Lucy Walkers Waste Land (2010), and Harmony Korines Trash
Humpers (2009). Drawing from new materi-alist models, the article
situates the ethical import of these very different films in
rela-tion to the way that they present waste as a vibrant and
affectively charged medium through which we might rethink relations
between people and things. It argues that a careful evaluation of
the way these films generate and manage affect is crucial to an
understanding of the kinds of ethical work each might be said to
perform. While The Gleaners and I and Waste Land emphasize the
uplifting feelings that can be generated from trash if we learn to
see it differently, Trash Humpers rejects the activist, humanist
ethos of Vardas and Walkers films in favour of an avant-garde
impulse to degrade and defile. However, despite its nihilistic
approach to its subject matter, this article argues that Trash
Humpers feel-bad aesthetic does not rule out the possibility of
ethical engagement. Rather, it offers important insights about the
role of negative affect within an ethics of waste.
This article considers questions of affect and ethics in
relation to three films about waste. Specifically, it examines
Harmony Korines Trash Humpers (2009) alongside two documentary
films about trash: Agns Vardas Les glaneurs et la glaneuse/The
Gleaners & I (2000) and Lucy Walkers Oscar nominated Waste Land
(2010). Both documentaries have attracted a great deal of popular
and
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Tina Kendall
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1. The paradigm of the new materialism includes work by a
diverse range of theorists; it draws from, and overlaps with,
recent philosophical work in speculative realism, object-oriented
ontology, media archaeology, ecotheory, and other discrete but
interrelated traditions. For the purposes of this article, I focus
especially on Jane Bennetts influential book, Vibrant Matter: A
Political Ecology of Things (2010), which has influenced debates
across several of these strands (see also Bryant et al. 2011; Coole
and Frost 2010; DeLanda 2000; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012; Bolt
and Barrett 2012).
critical attention for their deeply moving portrayals of
marginalized subjects who make their living from what other people
throw away. The Gleaners and I is a road movie of sorts, in which
film-maker Varda drives across the French countryside and cities in
order to document how different communities of people have learned
to fashion a living from refuse. It has been praised for the
sensitivity that it brings to its subject matter, and for the
complex ways that it weaves together reflections on trash and decay
with meditations on mortality and finitude, through an emphasis on
Vardas own process of aging, and on the power of film as an art of
salvage (Fischer 2012: 120). Walkers Waste Land takes a similar
approach, looking at the community of catadores, or trash pickers,
who make a living sorting through rubbish in the Jardim Gramacho,
the worlds largest dump in Rio de Janeiro. Like The Gleaners and I,
it engages directly with the ethical significance of waste, in a
documen-tary and explicitly humanist framework to construct an
emotionally charged appeal to spectators.
Korines Trash Humpers, by contrast, is a tongue-in-cheek,
fictional film about people who like to hump trash. In his review
of the film, Peter Bradshaw describes Trash Humpers as a
continuous, 78-minute afflict-a-thon. It sendeth acid rain on the
just and the unjust. It is a downpour on those who admire good
taste, and those who admire bad taste (Bradshaw 2010). This film
follows what the DVD booklet refers to as a small gang of elderly
Peeping Toms through the shadows of a nightmarishly familiar
suburban landscape as they dry hump garbage cans, fellate tree
branches, apply liquid dish soap to pancakes, smash up television
sets and fluorescent light bulbs, yelp like hyenas, tap-dance
chaotically in parking lots, power-wash wheel-chairs, and engage in
other unusual, debasing and violent rituals (Korine 2009).
Described by Korine as a film unearthed from the buried landscape
of the American nightmare, or as something found somewhere and
unearthed; an old VHS tape that was in some attick [sic] or buried
in some ditch, and shot using obsolete technology (degraded VHS
camcorders), the film explores the meaning of trash across a
complex array of registers (Korine 2009).
How might we evaluate the ethical significance of waste in these
three very different films? This article situates the ethical
import of these films in relation to the way that they present
waste as a vibrant and affectively charged medium through which we
might rethink the relationship between people and things. Despite
contrasts in tone, mode of address, aesthetic technique and
contexts of production and reception, each of these films is
preoccupied by the question of how people might live differently
with waste. At a very basic level, then, these films highlight what
Gay Hawkins, in The Ethics of Waste, calls the ethico-political
challenge of waste: imagining a new mate-rialism that would
transform our relations with the things we pretend not to see
(Hawkins 2006: 81). My essay reads these films in light of recent
new materialist critiques, which have highlighted the significance
of waste as part of a broader effort to revisit some of our basic
definitions of matter. While the specific contexts and theoretical
orientations of such enquiries have been wide ranging and diverse,
a shared goal of this work has been to conceive materi-ality less
in terms of binaries and hierarchies between people and things, to
think instead in terms of the sets of relations, networks and
assemblages that connect all matter on a plane of immanence.1
In this article, I consider how these films about waste do more
than just reflect the range of ecological, economic or ethical
questions that cluster around trash; they are themselves ethical to
the extent that they contribute
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Cinematic affect and the ethics of waste
47
new sensibilities and invite new ways of thinking and feeling
about trash and about the human subjects who form relations with
it. I am particularly interested in the role of feeling within this
process, and in thinking through the different ways that these
films about waste mobilize affect as part of their ethical
implication of the spectator. Indeed, this interest in thinking
through the ethical dimensions of affective spectatorship strongly
motivates my selec-tion of films. Despite the case that I have made
for affinities on the level of basic subject matter, we also need
to acknowledge just how wildly these films contrast in terms of
their aesthetic and affective approaches. I argue that a careful
evaluation of the way these films generate and manage affect is
crucial to an understanding of the kinds of ethical work each might
be said to perform. Cinematic ethics, in this context, refers at
once to the sensory and affective dimensions of the
spectator-screen relationship, and to the questions of
responsibility, self-reflexivity, desire and engagement with
otherness, which are foregrounded when considering our intellectual
(and emotional) attachments to art and culture (Downing and Saxton
2010: 1).
new maTerialisT eThiCs of wasTe There is to date a rich critical
history that addresses the ethical and political significance of
waste, disgust and abjection in relation to aspects of human
subjectivity and to notions of cultural and social value (Douglas
1966; Bataille 1985; Kristeva 1982; Laporte 2000; Benjamin 1999).
However, the recent new materialist turn across the social sciences
and humanities has prompted a re-evaluation of some of our most
deeply held assumptions about presumed divisions between human and
non-human life. One key feature of this approach has been to
emphasize the inherent creativity and agency that is integral to
even the most passive and inanimate seeming matter. Waste occu-pies
a strategic position within these debates because it is the kind of
matter we frequently take to be at the antipodes of human life:
dead, inert, disgusting and without value, meaning or agency of any
kind. New materialist theory seeks to challenge or complicate these
understandings of waste, which cast it as the purely symbolic Other
of human agency, endeavouring to show how waste is also lively
matter, which shares in some of the creative activity we tend to
assume is a distinctive marker of human life.
As Hawkins notes in The Ethics of Waste, such binaries are
implicit within many dominant accounts of rubbish, from discourses
surrounding environ-mental politics to critiques of consumer
capitalism. In these accounts, there is a tendency to lock trash
into a binary of things vs humans, in which all of the agency,
privilege and value rests on the human side of the equation; waste
is simply that which must be managed, relegated to the outside, or
just overlooked. Along these lines, Hawkins notes: waste is a
central character in an already well-established disenchantment
story, which presumes a funda-mental dualism between human culture
and non-human nature (Hawkins 2006: 89). And as Jane Bennett notes
in Vibrant Matter (2010), it is precisely this image of dead or
thoroughly instrumentalized matter that feeds human hubris and our
earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so,
she notes by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing,
smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of non-human powers
circulating around and within human bodies (Bennett 2010: xi). In
this framework, Hawkins notes, waste can only be bad; it makes us
feel bad, its presence disgusts and horri-fies us, it wrecks
everything (Hawkins 2006: 910). The problem with such
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Tina Kendall
48
disenchantment stories for both Hawkins and Bennett, is that in
making us feel bad about waste and wasting, it becomes too easy to
slip into arrogant self-centeredness or nihilism. Hawkins notes
that instead of inspiring posi-tive action, a politics based on the
imperative to reform the self in the name of nature can easily
slide into moralism or resentment, distracting attention from how
we actually live with waste and blinding us to the ubiquity of
ethi-cal work (Hawkins 2006: 1213). And in a similar vein, Bennett
argues in The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001), the
characterization of the world as disen-chanted ignores and then
discourages affective attachment to that world (2001: 3).
In place of this image of a disenchanted world, new materialisms
develop their account of ethics from a basis of acknowledging the
agency and vibrancy of matter. As Bennett notes, for vital
materialists:
[T]he starting point of ethics is [] the recognition of human
participa-tion in a shared, vital materiality. We are vital
materiality and we are surrounded by it, though we do not always
see it that way. The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the
ability to discern non-human vital-ity, to become perceptually open
to it.
(2010: 3)
As Bennett suggests here, this ethical model is not dependent on
the cultiva-tion of a conscious moral attitude that seeks to do
ones bit for the planet, but proceeds from a more basic level of
embodied receptivity to the liveli-ness of matter. Such an ethics
calls for a perceptual praxis: the cultivation of a disposition of
anticipatory readiness and a perceptual style open to what Bennett
calls the affective force of thing-power: the strange ability of
ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to
mani-fest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the
outside of our experience (2010: xiv).
The medium of film would appear to lend itself particularly well
to this ethical task of cultivating our perceptual ability to
discern non-human vitality (2010: 3). Indeed, many canonical film
theories have defined cinema precisely in relation to its ability
to foster a renewed attentiveness to materiality, to bring
spectators into intimate contact with what Siegfried Kracauer calls
the refuse of existence (1960: 54). In what follows, I draw from
this new mate-rialist model of ethics to explore how these three
films about waste respond to this challenge. Following Bennett and
Hawkins, I consider how these films engage with the disenchantment
stories that cluster around waste, and consider the aesthetic and
affective strategies each adopts to explore relation-ships between
people and things. In doing so, however, I want to question some of
the implicit assumptions about the ethical value of negative affect
that often underpin these theories. As Diana Coole and Samantha
Frost note in a recent collection of essays on the new materialism,
the prevailing ethos of new materialist ontology is more positive
and constructive than critical or negative (2010: 8). Indeed, for
both Hawkins and Bennett, it is the mood of enchantment premised on
a joyful and affirmative recognition of human participation in a
vital, shared materiality which operates as the hinge for ethical
responsiveness and political action. Although they do admit of bad
feelings in small doses, these theories have a tendency to downplay
the value of negativity on the grounds that negative affect and
critical thinking may not sustain the ethical task of fostering
deep or meaningful attachments between
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Cinematic affect and the ethics of waste
49
humans and the material environment. While we certainly need
theories that can guard against the feelings of moralism and
resentment that disenchant-ment stories might call into play, I
echo Timothy Mortons claim that an ecologically informed ethics
must include darkness as well as light, negativity as well as
positivity (Morton 2010: 16). Negativity can be a useful bedfellow
for an ethics of waste, because, as Sianne Ngai argues in Ugly
Feelings, nega-tive affects are marked by an ambivalence that will
enable them to resist being recuperated as a salve or solution to
the problems that they diagnose (Ngai 2005: 3). In this sense, they
can also be said to retain a political utility, training us not
just to the vitality of matter, but to the all-too-human
prac-tices, processes, and thoughts that occlude or despoil it.
Furthermore, we need to remain equally wary about the effects of
the feel-good emotions that are often marshalled when waste is
framed cinematically in more affirmative terms, as a source of
enchantment. Indeed, there is also a whole discursive tradition
running counter to these disenchantment stories that emphasizes
precisely the vitality and utopic convertibility of waste. These
cultural accounts play instead on what I call redemption narratives
stories that mine the connection between salvaging and salvation,
foregrounding wastes ability to redeem human lives in a parallel
process through which waste is recognized as a vital resource.
While the focus in these narratives on the protean liveliness of
waste has the potential to suspend or challenge ontologi-cal
distinctions between humans and things, very often they generate a
reas-suring image of waste that is hospitable to human needs and
amenable to our emotional investments. While such stories retain a
powerful emotional resonance, they can also make trouble for a new
materialist ethics of waste, since wastes latent vibrancy in these
narratives is frequently gauged in rela-tion to human needs. In
these stories, waste is still often passive and inert matter until
it is converted into value, redeemed by human acts of generosity,
care, or agency. We need to see how both of these narratives work,
then, as different sides of the same coin: while disenchantment
stories picture waste as symptoms of socio-economic or ecological
discontent, redemption narra-tives present it in terms of a
cathartic working through, offering redemptive solutions to these
same problems. At the same time, we need to recognize that the
affects that these narratives generate and mobilize in the form of
feel-bad or feel-good emotions are a vital component of the ethical
work they may be understood to perform. The task for a cinematic
ethics of waste, from this point of view, would be to resist the
process by which the sensory and affective force of thing-power
settles down into neatly packaged emotions that offer no challenge
to our ways of thinking about humannon-human relations.
In what follows, I will consider the very different aesthetic
and affec-tive strategies these films develop as part of their
exploration of the ways we might relate to rubbish. Although The
Gleaners & I and Waste Land are very different in the way that
they imagine relations between people and things, both films
emphasize the life-affirming feelings that can be generated from
encounters with trash if we learn to see it differently. By
contrast, Trash Humpers offers very little, if anything, in the way
of a feel-good factor that might be extracted from a revitalized
attentiveness to rubbish. Instead, Trash Humpers is a distinctly
feel-bad film, which rejects the activist and explic-itly humanist
ethos of Vardas and Walkers films in favour of an avant-garde
impulse to sully, degrade and defile (Lbecker 2011). However,
despite its nihilistic approach to its subject matter, I argue that
Trash Humperss feel-bad aesthetic does not rule out the possibility
of ethical engagement. Rather, it
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Tina Kendall
50
offers important insights about the role of negative affect
within a cinematic ethics of waste.
feel-good eThiCs: (The Gleaners and I)In The Gleaners and I,
Varda documents a wide variety of gleaners as they go about their
daily routines. Some gather agricultural waste deemed unfit for
consumption and left to rot in fields, while urban gleaners forage
for food leftover from farmers markets or dumped in household bins.
Others, such as Varda herself, incorporate trash and found objects
within decorative or artistic work. It is a powerfully moving film,
regularly described by critics and view-ers in superlative and
distinctly emotional terms. Meredith Brodys review in the Chicago
Reader calls it a [b]eautiful, absorbing, and touching []
experi-ence not to be missed, while A. O. Scott observes in the New
York Times that although the film looks at difficult social issues,
The Gleaners and I is never depressing. Even at their most
desperate [] Ms. Vardas gleaners retain a resilient, generous
humanity that is clearly brought to the surface by her own tough,
open spirit (Brody 2000; Scott 2000). A vital part of the films
allure for these critics is the way that it seeks to convert the
negative affective reso-nances of waste found in environmental
discourses the sort that make us feel bad into a more uplifting,
feel-good cinematic experience for spectators. As I will argue, The
Gleaners & I creates this affirmative experience with
extraor-dinary subtlety and intelligence, calling for a renewed
attentiveness to waste that also challenges common sense ideas of
what it means to be human.
The Gleaners and I plays a prominent role in Hawkinss The Ethics
of Waste. She notes that the achievement of Vardas film is to open
up the question of the person-thing relation in such a way that we
are able to see the complexities of a different and radical ethics
of waste at work (2006: 81). What makes this ethics different and
radical for Hawkins is the way that the film asks us to look past
disenchantment stories, to notice waste in ways that disrupt the
bound-aries between subject and object, human and non-human, useful
and useless, dead and alive (2006: 86). Paradoxically, Varda
accomplishes this questioning of boundaries between human and
non-human through an explicitly human-ist framework, emphasizing
how the distinctly human values of compas-sion and generosity are
vital for an ethics of waste. In her reading, Hawkins focuses in
particular on one of the most frequently discussed episodes from
the film, in which Varda visits a field where potatoes deemed unfit
for sale are dumped and left to rot. In this segment, Varda
conducts interviews with a range of people, including farmers who
discuss the supermarket-imposed constraints on what is saleable and
what is not, and groups of gleaners who collect potatoes that have
to be thrown out as a result, including one man who, as we learn,
gleans potatoes in order to serve them in a soup kitchen for the
homeless. These interviews are interspersed with shots that picture
the process of potato harvesting, and others that show potatoes
that have been dumped in a field unperturbed by gleaners. Varda
uses these potatoes as a means of telescoping the extraordinary
range of meanings, values and uses that humans establish with
things that, for one reason or another, are thrown away. Through
the various interviews, the discarded potatos mean-ing is situated
alternately as crop, as livelihood, as commodity, as a source of
nutrition, as something to be gleaned, or as unsalvageable
waste.
These competing frames of reference testify to the diversity of
meanings, values, uses and relations that humans establish with the
material world.
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Cinematic affect and the ethics of waste
51
They also indicate the inherent instability of the concept of
waste, since what is taken for granted by one person as being unfit
for human consumption is seen as a perfectly valuable source of
nutrition for another. It is precisely this semantic instability
that Vardas film seeks to highlight as the film unfolds. Her
investigation into waste and the uses that various people find for
it expands to include interviews with a range of people, including
legal experts who define waste from a juridical standpoint, the
psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, who talks about waste within a
psychoanalytic framework, to ordi-nary people who challenge
definitions of waste through their acts of gleaning. Amongst these
subjects, Varda explores their motivations for recuperating
rubbish, to find some who glean out of necessity, others who glean
as a form of activist protest against the fast-paced cycles of
consumption and waste that sustain consumer capitalism, and still
others who glean materials for artistic work. While ostensibly the
aim of such interviews would be to clarify and pin down the subject
matter being investigated, the effect in Vardas film is precisely
the opposite: as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly
difficult to discern in any objective sense what waste is, since it
can always be recu-perated for use. And indeed, an important aspect
of Vardas radical ethics of waste relates to the trouble she makes
for our common sense ways of appre-hending and evaluating what
trash is at a very basic level. What The Gleaners and I suggests
instead is that waste is nothing more or less than a by-product of
human attention and affection: it is what we designate as unworthy
of our concern or feeling. And this understanding of waste as a
corollary of human attention and affection is central to Vardas
ethical and aesthetic project in this film. Indeed, the films
central metaphor connects activities of gleaners who seek out
residual value in what has been thrown away, with Vardas own
process of gathering up and saving images of the marginal and
overlooked. Both Varda and the gleaners embody an ethical
sensibility founded on a will-ingness to notice and to care for
what is overlooked: in Bennetts terms, to become perceptually open
to wastes vitality and possibilities. The film also seeks to
implicate spectators into this ethical project, asking us to invest
our attention and emotion in subjects that we might otherwise
choose to ignore.
A key moment in which the film solicits the spectators emotional
involve-ment occurs towards the end of the potato sequence. While
conducting an interview with one of the gleaners in a field of
dumped potatoes, Vardas attention is arrested by a heart-shaped
potato amongst those thrown away for failing to conform to
supermarket standards. Foraging through the pile further, Varda
discovers several heart-shaped potatoes, which she bundles together
into her bag, takes home, and films. Varda zooms in on the
heart-shaped potatoes in close detail, and as she does so, she
muses about connec-tions between these heart shaped potatoes and
the forms of charity and generosity that they could sustain if they
were not dumped in remote fields and left unseen. This prompts a
new series of interviews with gleaners who pick up potatoes as part
of their voluntary work with charities, including one man who does
so to serve in a local charity soup kitchen. These interviews
invite a strong emotional response, bringing together the plight of
those who have nothing to eat, with the generosity of charity
workers who reinvest in waste as a resource for helping others. The
heart-shaped potatoes in this sequence take on emotional value as
symbols of the virtues of compassion and care that is at the heart
of the films ethical aesthetic. It is a powerful rhetorical
gesture, which taps into the pathos of what is thrown away, and
seeks to convert it into feelings of responsibility, generosity and
care for fellow
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Tina Kendall
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humans. This is one of the ways that The Gleaners and I is
frequently read: Virginia Bonner notes that the film works to
cultivate a humanist awareness of, and interpellation into, a
community of gleaners, humanitarians, fellow humans (Bonner 2009:
124).
Such an emphasis on waste as a corollary of human attention
would appear to sit uncomfortably with a new materialist ethics of
waste, suggesting as it does a human-centric imposition of meaning
and value onto the materiality of the vegetable. And yet, the
potatoes in this sequence yield other possibili-ties for Hawkins.
She argues that the anthropocentric framing of the wasted potatoes
is held in check, counterbalanced by an emphasis on the
materi-ality of waste, and its capacity to exceed human designs.
Key for Hawkins is the haptic address that is created in scenes in
which we are brought into close proximity with the sensuous,
tactile materiality of the potatoes. Here, the exclusively human
framing of the potato gives way to a different form of perception,
which encounters the potato as something alien and strange, and at
least momentarily as resistant to human needs and meanings. As
Hawkins enthuses, it is hard not to become caught up in the emotion
of this scene: we experience Vardas sensuous enchantment with the
potato through the cinematic process of being affected, being
altered by feelings (2006: 84). And it is precisely this
possibility of being emotionally affected that opens the way for
ethical response in Hawkinss model. Affect, she notes can be the
impulse for new relations and the motivation for a different
ethics, a sudden inspira-tion for a new use (2006: 36).
Crucially, this same experience of sensuous, affective
spectatorship is rendered in subsequent scenes from the film, in
which Varda turns the camera on herself, to consider the texture of
her own skin in relation to the potatoes. In picturing her own
flesh in the process of becoming-waste, she re-distributes the
sorts of agencies that we normally ascribe to people and things,
showing how thing-power resides in both human and non-human matter.
This creates for a highly complex mood or tone; while the emphasis
on loss, decay, ageing and death creates a sense of melancholy,
such disenchanting feelings are held in check by the films emphasis
on the vibrant, energetic material processes that animate both
human and non-human matter. It is this gesture of creating new
relations between people and waste, while suspending their
hierarchi-cal meanings, which is the source of the films ethical
value for Hawkins. The feel-good aspect of the film arguably
sustains that project, by moving specta-tors gently towards an
affirmative recognition of our deep imbrication with the
materiality of waste and with things we choose not to see. While it
constructs a moving, uplifting message about humans and waste, this
film rejects the kinds of hierarchies that underpin most humanisms.
Instead, it negotiates a revised understanding of the human that is
enhanced and expanded through an ethical aesthetic that recognizes
both disenchantment and thing-power as a property of both human and
non-human life.
feel-good moralism: (WasTe land)Like The Gleaners & I,
Walkers documentary Waste Land engages directly with the ethical
questions that subtend our relations with waste. Even more so than
Vardas film, Walkers Waste Land trades on the pathos of waste, and
directs its production of affect towards feelings of empathy for
the trash pick-ers whose livelihoods depend on finding value in
what is thrown away. This strong emotional address is central to
the way that the film has been marketed
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Cinematic affect and the ethics of waste
53
and received. The films tagline, for example, explicitly
addresses the spectator in strongly emotional terms, telling us:
What happens in the worlds largest trash city will transform you.
Critics have likewise situated the film in relation to the way it
taps into the power of waste to move spectators emotionally. John
De Fores review for the Hollywood Reporter, for instance, argues,
squalor and garbage make for a surprisingly heartwarming tale,
noting that it is a joy to watch despite the abject poverty it
contains (De Fore 2010). In a review for the Huffington Post, Jason
Silva calls Waste Land the Slumdog Millionaire of documentaries: an
inspiring, deeply moving crowd-pleaser that manages to uplift the
spirit while set against the backdrop of garbage (Silva 2010). As
these reviews make clear, the film foregrounds the redemptive
meanings of both trash and art, seeking to convert both into a
powerfully moving emotional encounter. But, as I will argue, while
it is an intensely moving film, Waste Land does very little to
redraw relations between human and non-human life, or to implicate
us ethically in what is shown. Rather, the film foregrounds the
cathartic, redemptive capacities of art to transform feel-bad
poverty and human suffering into an uplifting, feel-good message,
while absolving us of responsibility for what we see.
The subjects of the film are artist Vik Muniz and the trash
pickers of the Jardim Gramacho, who are the subjects of his latest
project entitled Pictures of Garbage. Born in Brazil and based in
Brooklyn, New York, Muniz has garnered an international reputation
for his unique photographic-cum-sculptural process, which consists
of reconstructing famous paintings from a wide range of mate-rials,
including diamonds, dust, sugar cane, lunch meat, wire, chocolate
sauce, junk, tiny toys and so on, and then re-photographing them.
Munizs work plays on a number of tensions, including contrasts
between the three-dimensional, tactile and aggressively
material-based set-ups, and the two-dimensional, deceptively flat
glossiness of his resulting photographs (Smith 2011). While his
subjects are diverse, his formal approach consistently interrogates
the trans-formative possibilities of the art of salvage. In Waste
Land, film-maker Walker follows Muniz as he travels from his home
in Brooklyn, New York, back to Rio de Janeiro, hoping to give
something back to the community where he was born. He travels to
the slums outside of Rio, to photograph a selection of trash
pickers who work in the Jardim Gramacho, hoping, he says, to change
the lives of a group of people by using the same materials that
they deal with everyday.
Scenes early in the film introduce us to the individual stories
of the pick-ers, letting us in on details of their lives as they go
about the business of sorting through the rubbish looking for
recyclable materials. In these shots, the film captures something
of the cinematic richness and intensity of the Jardim Gramacho
setting, as hulking trucks file in to deliver fresh material to a
vast, seemingly endless sea of rubbish. The scale of these scenes
is espe-cially impressive, framing waste as a cinematic spectacle
that is both awe-inspiring and anxiety inducing in its vastness.
Such moments, when waste is framed on such a monumental scale,
confront spectators with snippets of the kind of intimate, sensory
thing-power that a cinematic ethics of waste is charged with
disclosing. There is something about how small and vulner-able the
pickers look against the shifting mountains of rubbish that creates
a striking sense of wastes uncanny agency and vitality, calling
into question just how much control or mastery human subjects
really do wield in the face such colossal chaos. But while these
moments have the potential to confront us both viscerally and
intellectually with the vibrant creativity of matter, and to
question the place of humans at the putative centre of the
universe, the
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Tina Kendall
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film largely fails to deliver on this critique. As the film
progresses, it is clear that Walkers main interest in filming waste
remains squarely on the human interest angle of the catadores
experience, and on the sentimental reac-tions that their stories
might generate. In other words, Walker is interested in the power
of redemption stories to transform viewers by moving them
emotionally. Such an aim has ethical ambitions, but the film
instead drums up emotional response as a source of moral empathy,
which, as Michele Aaron argues, forgoes the ambiguity and labour of
ethical reflection in order to dictate or guarantee a
less-challenging univocal response (Aaron 2007: 117). Throughout
the film, we are repeatedly encouraged to sympathize with the
plight of the pickers and their dreams of leaving the Jardim
Gramacho for a better life. At one point, one of the catadores
addresses Muniz, telling him candidly, this is no future;
subsequently, as he takes her portrait, he asks her to think about
what she will do when she gets out of the Jardim Gramacho. What
this means is that far from asking spectators to recognize all of
the ways that human lives are bound up with waste, and to
acknowledge our place within the economic system that produces such
hardship in the first place, the film instead focuses our attention
on the possibility that hardship can be redeemed once this waste
land is left behind.
This background prepares for, and lends emotional weight to,
Munizs Pictures of Garbage art project, which springs from Munizs
ethical sense of responsibility and from a desire to give something
back to the community where he was raised. The film details Munizs
artistic process step-by-step, beginning with scenes in which we
see the artist as he meets the pickers in the dump. After choosing
which of the catadores he will photograph, Muniz arranges his
subjects, using props found in the dump, into poses that re-create
classic paint-ings, including one of Tiao, which is made to
resemble Jean-Louis Davids The Death of Marat, and another
picturing Suelem and her two children in a pose reminiscent of a
Renaissance Madonna and child painting. Subsequent scenes focus on
the next steps in Munizs artistic process, in which large-scale
sketches of the original photographs are produced and placed on the
floor of a large warehouse. The rough sketches are then filled in
using a range of different waste materials that the pickers
themselves have gathered and arranged following Munizs
instructions. Later, these trash art installations are
re-photographed, mounted and framed, and sold at auction in London
at the Phillips de Pury auction house. We learn that Muniz donates
100 per cent of the proceeds back to the workers of the Jardim
Gramacho, to improve their lives.
This film shares the compassionate and explicitly humanitarian
ethos of The Gleaners & I, aiming to engage the social
consciousness of its viewers by inviting us to see the consequences
of the Wests massive overproduction of disposable goods. In doing
so, it proposes waste as a figure through which we might visualize
the unvisualizable networks, flows and forces that comprise our
global world system: as the films official trailer notes, looking
at waste opens a way of tracing connections between the poorest
people living in Rio slums, with the world of high end contemporary
art. By foregrounding the uneven distributions of wealth and
privilege between these two contexts, and calling attention to
Munizs dilemma over the impact that his interventions will have is
he falsely raising the catadores hopes of a better life? How will
they cope with the attention they receive? the film purports to
raise a series of thorny ethical questions about the material and
social relations that are mediated by trash. However, the emphasis
on redemption and the cathar-tic role of emotion in this film tends
to distract attention away from such
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Cinematic affect and the ethics of waste
55
questions. Rather than cultivating a sensibility that would
allow spectators to recognize their implication in what is shown,
or to redraw relations between humans and non-humans, the film
focuses on cathartic, emotional response as a salve for capitalist
disenchantment. Indeed, the film casts Muniz as a saviour figure,
absolving spectators of their ethical responsibility by proposing
the artist as the agent of redemption. The trailer consolidates
such associa-tions in particular through cuts between Muniz and
Rios iconic Christ the Redeemer statue, and through the inclusion
of Mobys God Moving over the Face of the Waters as the musical
track to accompany these images.
This emphasis on transfiguration and redemption is also
consolidated through time-lapse sequences, in which we see the
large-scale drawings made from the photographic portraits of the
catadores slowly being filled in by different waste materials
gathered from the dump. Here again, while these portraits have the
potential to emphasize the way that humans are deeply bound up with
waste, and to caution against attempts at drawing clear divi-sions
between human and non-human materiality, Walkers interest lies
else-where. In keeping with the films emphasis on redemption, these
portraits instead endorse the inherent dignity and resilience of
human life, its ability to overcome material hardship. They do so,
however, on the condition that the materiality of waste is made to
disappear. As the portraits begin to take shape, the camera films
them from a position high up on a scaffold alongside Muniz, which
gives both the artist and spectators the proper distance necessary
for the images of his subjects to emerge. We can only really see
these Pictures of Garbage on the condition that we are distanced
from the scene, and that the rubbish recedes into the background.
While Munizs aesthetic technique gestures towards the aesthetic
vitality of waste, the films redemption narra-tive pushes it into
the background, resurrecting it in the form of a human face. So
doing, the film shores up notions of human dignity, the endurance
of the human spirit, and the capacity of art to transform
lives.
These scenes also foreground emotional response, and invite
spectators to participate in the emotional journeys of the trash
pickers. The scene in which Suelem sees her portrait as it emerges
from the rubbish for the first time asks us to linger over her
tears as she is overcome with emotion at seeing her image
transformed into a work of art, while similar scenes at the auction
house in London explicitly mobilize our emotional response when
Tiao witnesses his picture amongst those that are sold for
exorbitant amounts of money. I would suggest that what viewers find
so emotionally moving about such moments, and about the films
project as a whole, is the way that it refers us back to
comfort-able certainties about human dignity and endurance, rather
than prompting any kind of ethical challenge to our ways of
imagining relations between humans and waste. The redemption
narrative produces a reassuring image of waste, making us feel
good, but also absolving us of any responsibility. Although this
film emphasizes the ethical questions that subtend our relations
with waste, it reproduces effects that Hawkins ascribes to feel-bad
disenchantment stories: it slide[s] into moralism, distracting
attention from how we actually live with waste and blinding us to
the ubiquity of ethical work (Hawkins 2006: 13).
feel-bad eThiCs: (Trash humpers)Like The Gleaners & I and
Waste Land, Korines Trash Humpers pictures a community of people
who forge novel alliances with waste, and who thus re-define trash
as a resource. However, while the former two films argue for
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Tina Kendall
56
recognition of wastes transformative and uplifting potential,
Korines film undercuts such life-affirming pretexts. Instead, the
film confronts audiences with wastes distinctively feel-bad
associations, presenting it as a source of libidinal gratification
and as a pure expression of the Ids destructive bent. No mere
metaphor, Trash Humpers delivers on what is advertised in the
title: interspersed through the film are scenes in which a band of
degener-ate vandals wearing geriatric masks (played by Korine and
his wife, Rachel, amongst others) are pictured in public spaces
getting their sexual kicks by dry-humping rubbish bins and black
refuse sacks, as well as fences, trees, prostitutes and mailboxes.
Elsewhere, the humpers wreak havoc on their surroundings, smashing
up electrical equipment in parking lots, defecating in driveways,
peeping voyeuristically into other peoples homes, and defiling
pretty much everything they come into contact with. In keeping with
film-maker Korines reputation as enfant terrible of the American
indie film scene, Trash Humpers seeks to confront spectators. At
the world premiere of his film at the Toronto International Film
Festival in 2009, for instance, Korine stated that his intention as
a film-maker is always to provoke a real reaction. He went on to
extrapolate: I cant imagine making something and not wanting people
to feel it even if a large portion of the audience doesnt want to
have anything to do with the feeling (Korine in Brooks 2009).
Critical accounts of the film are divided, but a sampling of
reviews suggest that the film is at the same time provocative and
predictable; both crass and intelligently conceived; simultaneously
funny and boring to the point of tedium; and that in spite of these
qualities, there is something about it that is fascinating and
horrify-ing, and that sticks with us well after the event of
watching. In his review for Newsweek, David Ansen remarks, as eager
as I was for the movie to be over, its dirty rummage-sale images
wont go away. Trash Humpers leaves the residue of an authentic
nightmare. Youll want to shower afterward (Ansen 2009). As these
remarks suggest, Trash Humpers taps into waste as a power-ful
source of disenchantment, mobilizing negative affect into a
contagious experience that spectators cannot quite shake off. As I
will argue, this affec-tive response relates to the radical way
that the film imagines the relationship between people and
waste.
Trash Humpers explores the meaning of waste across a range of
thematic and formal registers. Like Korines earlier films Gummo
(1997) and julien donkey-boy (1999), Trash Humpers draws on
metonymic connections between waste and the kind of white trash
freak show imagery that is a staple of popular American television
shows such as The Jerry Springer Show (Simons-Sorota, 1991-Present)
or Jackass (Jonze, 2000-2002) (Halligan 2005: 183). As in Korines
previous films, Trash Humpers uses these implicitly racist and
class stereotypes in a deeply ambiguous way, offering up its
redneck char-acters as a voyeuristic source of both fascination and
horror, and declining to send any reassuring messages about how to
interpret them. At the same time, the film pursues an exploration
of waste and obsolescence on a formal level, through its use of a
degraded VHS camcorder for primary filming, and through the films
extratextual framing as a found object unearthed from a ditch or an
attic. The combined effect of these devices is to mark what we are
seeing as authentic dispatches from the trash humpers private video
archives. This means that as spectators we are invited to look on
voyeuristically at the trash humpers, and at the variety of
performances that they document, which range from the eccentric, to
the oddly disturbing and the violently extreme. Indeed, the film
plays on our desire to gawp at the shocking antics of its
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Cinematic affect and the ethics of waste
57
less-than-human characters and the trashy world they inhabit,
while remain-ing at a distance from them.
Scenes from early in the film trade on the absurd humour
implicit in Korines literalization of the imagined relations of
proximity between humans and waste that are implicit in the white
trash stereotype. The films open-ing sequence consists of a series
of relatively brief shots that introduce us to the humpers and
their curious pastimes. We catch an initial glimpse of a humper
(Herv) crouching on the driveway of an ordinary suburban
middle-class American home in what looks to be an attempt at
defecation, with his crutches splayed in front of him. Subsequent
images picture another humper (Momma) clandestinely dry-humping
rubbish bins in a pristine suburban alley-way, and later the other
two humpers (Buddy and Travis) join in by attempt-ing to fornicate
a pile of black rubbish sacks. Later, we are invited to laugh as
the humpers perform random stunts, such as when the humpers
power-wash a wheelchair at the car wash, when they smash up a
derelict house, or as they laze around on rooftops or under
freeways, drinking and setting off firecrackers. Many of these
episodes derive their humour precisely from the unusual relations
that the humpers establish with their material surroundings, and
with waste in particular. In one key scene, which takes place in a
floodlit parking lot, the humpers watch as Buddy raises a large
television set above his head, sending it hurtling onto the
pavement. The other humpers goad him on, shouting barely
decipherable Cmons and Yeahs. The camcorder docu-ments this strange
performance, as a high-fi radio is thrown onto the demol-ished
television set, and as Buddy and the other humpers kick and stomp
on the obsolete electrical equipment. While the DVD booklet refers
to such antics as constituting an ode to vandalism, the accent in
such sequences is less on a feeling of disaffected aggression as it
is on a playful or even joyful exuberance (Korine 2009). And
indeed, the scene culminates in an improvised tap-dance
performance, in which Buddy and companys arms and legs flail wildly
while they shriek like hyenas. These scenes are both disturbing and
oddly compel-ling for the ways that the trash humpers reject the
prescribed uses of objects, releasing them, as Walter Benjamin
might have it, from the drudgery of being useful and reinventing
them as performative and playful (Benjamin 1999: 9). These early
sequences invite us to share in the hilarity, but only as distanced
onlookers. We are encouraged to laugh at the crass humour of the
Jackass-style stunts, or to look on with the kind of fascinated
disgust that we might reserve for watching animals in a zoo. These
scenes play on the voyeuristic pleasures that might be derived from
watching the humpers from a position of distance and superiority,
in which our own full humanity is affirmed in contrast to the
entertaining spectacle of less-than-human trash.
In contrast to both Vardas and Walkers films, Trash Humpers
works by transforming this crass humour into a much darker, more
ambivalent response. Later scenes in the film work to expose this
position of security by foregrounding the spectators complicity
with the spectacle that is unfolding not just in front of our eyes,
but also for our eyes. Significant in this respect is the dramatic
shift that occurs roughly 30 minutes into the film, where the
humpers antics stop being prankish and funny, and open onto more
violent and disturbing terrain, which confronts us with, and works
to short circuit, our earlier affective response. In the midst of a
typical scene in which the humpers are pictured wreaking havoc
outdoors, we are suddenly confronted with what looks like a naked
body sprawled awkwardly in a grassy ditch. As we watch this image,
we hear Travis who is ostensibly positioned behind
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Tina Kendall
58
the camcorder, and responsible for documenting what we are
seeing blithely singing a disturbing lullaby about three little
devils who jumped over the wall/ lopped off his head/ and murdered
them all. Beyond this aural cue, there is very little information
to contextualize or lend meaning to this image. A later sequence
plays on this snuff motif more directly, as we are led into a scene
in which the humpers attempt to film a dog. The humpers camera
follows the dog as it rushes around a domestic interior, until
suddenly the dog leads the camera to a man lying in a pool of blood
on the kitchen floor. Again, we hear Traviss voice from behind the
camera saying, damn, you all killed this dude, damn. Theres a head
fucking fracture. But after this moment of disbelief, the humpers
response to this incident moves into darker, and much more
disturbing terrain, as Travis puts the camcorder aside in order to
pose with the other humpers next to the dead body, exclaiming, make
sure my hair looks good and look Ma, Im dead!
This sequence exposes the safety of the spectators voyeuristic
position, since it foregrounds bloody murder as a humorous and
entertaining specta-cle that in keeping with the humpers earlier
stunts is performed specifi-cally for our enjoyment. Indeed, in
both narrative and aesthetic terms, the killing and filming of
human death in this sequence is on a par with acts of non-human
destruction that we see throughout the film. There is no
modu-lation of the humpers emotional response to this event, which
might give it a special meaning or privilege within the narrative,
and aesthetically, the scene is filmed in the same haphazard,
fragmented and cursory manner as the humpers other escapades. In
flagrant violation of the terms of classi-cal narrative, there is
no build-up to this scene; we see only the aftermath. Neither are
we provided with any further development or narrative resolution
that would lend meaning or emphasis to this event. What this means
is that in the films aesthetic and affective economy, a human life
is exactly equivalent to a smashed light bulb, a derelict building,
obsolete electrical equipment, empty beer bottles, or any number of
wasted items that make up the films mise-en-scne. Indeed, what is
so disturbing about this scene is the way that it refuses any
qualitative distinctions of any kind, soliciting the same affective
response as earlier sequences, inviting us to laugh
indiscriminately at the characteriza-tion of both human and
non-human life as equally spent, squalid and worth-less. In this
way, Trash Humpers rejects the ethos of human generosity and care
that informs The Gleaners & I and Waste Land, in favour of an
aesthetic of absolute indifference, in which both human and
non-human life is radically desublimated. While critics have
frequently taken issue with Korines deploy-ment of white trash
freak show imagery, I would argue that his films are less
interested in reifying race and class based distinctions than they
are in exam-ining relations between people and their material
environments, while inter-rogating discourses of human dignity and
challenging our most fundamental assumptions about what it means to
be human.
Undeniably, this presentation of humans and things on a
horizontal plane makes for a distinctly feel-bad viewing
experience, because of the way it refuses the cathartic and
redemptive mission of art to compensate for ecologi-cal forms of
disenchantment. The films feel-bad aesthetic poses a serious
chal-lenge to a new materialist conception of a vibrant ethics of
waste, because of the way that it rides roughshod over the very
notions of vitality and positivity that inform such critiques.
However, in presenting human and non-human life as equally squalid,
Trash Humpers mobilization of negative affect does not rule out
ethical engagement entirely. On the contrary, as scholars such
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Cinematic affect and the ethics of waste
59
as Ngai, Timothy Morton, Michele Aaron and Nikolaj Lbecker have
argued, bad feeling may even nurture ethical reflection because of
the way it resists facile moralizing and proposing easy solutions
to the problems it addresses (Lbecker 2011: 167). While the film
clearly does not advocate a positive ethi-cal agenda, Trash
Humperss emphasis on bad feeling may nevertheless cata-lyse a
different sort of ethical response, which recognizes the deeply
unsettling inhuman forces that subtend our most human desires. This
feel-bad ethics would recognize the levelling force of the inhuman
as a means of safeguard-ing against anthropocentric ideas of human
mastery and self-aggrandizement. If we are to unsettle the
centuries-old belief in the privileged place of humans within a
universe of passive matter awaiting inscription, it may be that we
need an ethical aesthetic that is able to risk pushing more
radically against some of the comfortable certainties and
affirmative feelings that work to sustain it. We need an aesthetic
that works not (simply) by elevating matter to the level of the
human, but (also) by estranging and desublimating our
understandings of what it means to be human in the first place. In
making us feel bad, Trash Humpers necessitates a different approach
to ethics: one that works not simply by cultivating our ability to
discern non-human vitality, but also by bringing us into contact
with the ambivalent, disturbing, desublimating and
thought-provoking image of the inhuman that is also a facet of
material life.
aCKnowledgemenTsI am grateful to Tanya Horeck, Milla Tiainen,
Joss Hands, Neil Archer, Simon Payne, Nikolaj Lbecker and to New
Cinemas anonymous reviewers for their comments and constructive
advice on drafts of this article.
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suggesTed CiTaTionKendall, T. (2012), Cinematic affect and the
ethics of waste, New Cinemas
10: 1, pp. 4561, doi: 10.1386/ncin.10.1.45_1
ConTribuTor deTailsTina Kendall is Senior Lecturer and Course
Leader for Film Studies at Anglia Ruskin University. Her research
interests include European and American cinema and film-philosophy.
She is particularly interested in theories of affect, ethics, and
in new materialist theory. She is co-editor of The New Extremism in
Cinema: From France to Europe (Edinburgh University Press, 2011),
and editor of the disgust issue of Film-Philosophy (15:1). Her work
appears in New Review of Film & Television Studies, Other
Voices, Cinephile, and in a range of edited publications. She is
currently working on a study on boredom in contempo-rary
cinema.
Contact: Department of English, Film and Media, Anglia Ruskin
University, Cambridge, CB1 1PT, U.K.E-mail:
[email protected]
Tina Kendall has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work
in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
NC_10.1_Kendall_45-61.indd 61 7/4/13 9:37:36 PM
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Berlin School GlossaryAn ABC of the New Wave in German
Cinema
Edited by Roger F. Cook, Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, and Brad
Prager
ISBN 978-1-84150-576-3 | 262pp24.95, $40.00 | 2013 Paperback |
230x170mmeBook available
Roger F. Cook is professor of German studies and director of the
film studies programme at the University of MissouriColumbia, USA.
Lutz Koepnick is professor of German film and media studies at
Washington University in St. Louis, USA. Kristin Kopp is associate
professor of German studies at the University of MissouriColumbia,
where Brad Prager is also associate professor of German studies and
a member of the film studies programme.
NC_10.1_Kendall_45-61.indd 62 7/4/13 9:37:36 PM
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