Brief description of the film: It follows artist Vik Muniz, who grew up in Brazil but lives in New York, as he returns to Brazil to the largest garbage dump in the world: Jardim Gramacho, located just outside Rio de Janeiro. There are a group of people who live there, referred to as "pickers," whose job it is to go through all the trash that ends up there from all over Rio and find things that can be recycled. Muniz's goal is to create works of art out of the garbage and the people. He takes photos of the pickers posing with the garbage they deal with every day, then hires them to help him create even bigger works of art. They come back with him to a studio in Rio, where they arrange huge piles of trash to resemble the photographs Vik has taken, and then he takes photos of THAT. It's kind of hard to describe, so just take a look at this:
See all the garbage laid out around the guy in the bathtub? Muniz took a photo of this. That's the final product. This particular picture he sold at auction and gave all the proceeds to the pickers for them to build a library and some other stuff. You can also see the official website here and the official trailer here.
Clearly garbage plays a big role in this documentary. It's pretty appalling to see all of the trash from one of the world's biggest cities all piled up in one place. We have talked about trash a lot in this class. The bottom line with trash is that we don't think about it after throwing it away. No one really cares where it goes, just as long as it isn't stinking up our apartment anymore. Out of sight, out of mind. Well, now you see where it all ends up: one humongous pile of trash that just sits there doing nothing. And a lot of it can be recycled and reused.
More important are the parallels the film draws between the trash and the people who live and work among it. At one point, I think someone refers to the pickers as "human garbage," and in some ways, that's not far from the truth. These are poor folks who don't have any other way to make a living, so they sort through other people's trash looking for recyclable material. But no one cares about them, because no one sees them or has any interest in the trash they work with. Once again, out of sight, out of mind. So there's a distinct parallel drawn between how we treat our trash and how we treat people like the pickers.
One question I think the film asks (or at least that came to my mind) is, what would happen if we started actually thinking about both the pickers and the garbage they attend to? One of our readings a few weeks ago discussed treating people as human beings instead of as means of production to be done away with when no longer useful. I think the same point applies here. What if we both stopped throwing away so much stuff, AND started investing in education, health care, housing infrastructure, and creating decent jobs that paid living wages? Then we could kill two birds with one stone: we would no longer have such massive piles of garbage like in Jardim Gramacho, and we could harness the human power that the people in Jardim Gramacho possessed. Throughout the film, we see these people struggle to support themselves and obtain basic needs like education and housing. What if we actually provided such things for everyone? We might no longer have quite as much garbage, human or otherwise.
When you get right down to it, this is what sustainability is about: creating a world in which people actually want to live, and then giving them the capability to live within it, and do so productively and with respect. I think that's what "Wasteland" was trying to get at: the potential to transform our lives and the lives of many more people in the process.
No comments:
Post a Comment