Trash, art, and two movies

Agnès Varda’s 2000 essay film The Gleaners and I follows the legendary Left Bank filmmaker’s investigation into the history of gleaning, of the lives of those who stoop, who pick up what’s left behind, who scour the fields (or markets, or back alley trash cans) for needlessly wasted food (or objects) after the harvesters (or grocers, or restaurateurs) have taken what they’ve deemed worthy or saleable. Grains, fruit and vegetables from the fields, meat and fish from the refuse in urban spaces. Potatoes too large, too small, too oddly shaped, apples less than conventionally photogenic. Meat or dairy products tossed out on their “best before” dates that just a simple, good, critical sniff will tell you are still perfectly edible. (Varda is invited into homes to see these foods rescued from rot and prepared for eating, thus certain sequences of the film play out like some marvelous hobo cooking show.) Stoves and refrigerators left in the street are resurrected, if not for their intended use than for the purpose of storage or art. In paintings, such as Millet’s 1857 Des glaneuses, which features prominently in the film, gleaners were depicted as working in groups. Yet, while she finds gleaning couples and gypsy caravans in her search (which takes her to several regions of rural France, as well as the streets of Paris), many of Varda’s modern-day gleaners seem to be solitary, perhaps because the practice has become less and less socially acceptable, and in some cases a punishable offense.

More than a decade after its celebrated premiere, The Gleaners and I endures in part because it remains the definitive cinematic document on its field of study, but also because of the potency and allure of its highly personal, idiosyncratic approach, which stresses the filmmaker’s identification with her subjects. The film is dependent on what Varda encounters in her search, and what she’s able to produce with whatever she’s found, which is to say that Varda also gleans, but with a camera, specifically what was then the latest, most lightweight consumer camcorder, which she utilizes brilliantly. In Varda’s capable hands, hand-held contributes to the handmade, artisanal quality of The Gleaners and I. Hand-held also prompts a literal study of Varda’s hands, which reveal her age (she was in her early 70s at the time) in a manner that her curiosity, energy and tirelessly playful attitude do not. The so-called “grandmother of the French New Wave” is a mother of invention. Filmmaking is generally an art of deletion, or reduction, and The Gleaners and I is indeed well edited and fleetly paced, yet Varda nonetheless seems always ready to forge something valuable from what would conventionally seem discardable. (Anyone who’s seen the film will remember the wonderful “dance of the lens cap.”) She likes it when animals block the country roads, because she invites surprise. “A clock without hands is my kind of thing,” she says at one point in her running narration. (The soundtrack also features jazz and Francophone hip-hop.) Thus this homage to the marginalized and their resourcefulness reaches the heights that it does because the author of the film herself, while hardly marginal, represents the epitome of creative resourcefulness.

It could be one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this sprawling landfill (the world’s largest) that lies outside Rio de Janeiro, a place where refuse coats the earth so that earth itself remains unseen (as though refuse is earth, is soil and sediment). Refuse forms the substance of everyday life for Jardim Gramacho’s inhabitants, a population comprised of scavenger birds and human beings, workers sifting through the refuse for items to be resold or reused, from recyclable raw materials to clothes to food. These workers are the definition of marginal, surviving off of what the rest of us discard. Waste Land penetrates the world of Gramacho through the very special lens provided by Vik Muniz, whose series of mammoth portraits of Gramacho workers, crafted in collaboration with his subjects out of the very garbage they work in, constitutes the Brazilian-American artist’s most ambitious and visionary project to date.

The film, co-credited to João Jardim, Karen Harley and Lucy Walker (who recently helmed Countdown to Zero, a chilling documentary about nuclear weapons), is partly about Muniz, his life and methods. As much as is the case with any visual artist, Muniz’s work is tremendously tactile, his insistence on the alignment of materials and subject matter makes an immeasurable impression on you when you share the same physical space. The experience of seeing the work in two dimensions fails to do it justice. Yet the film’s unique access to Muniz’s process enriches our response to the work in a unique manner, whether or not we’re able to see it in the flesh. I only wish this process wasn’t conveyed at times through stiff, seemingly scripted exchanges, not to mention the occasional activist platitude (and I wish it didn’t have to be accompanied, which is to say overwhelmed, by Moby’s music). Waste Land is in any case more emphatically about Gramacho, about its diverse people, whose dignity and perseverance in a lifestyle cloaked in shame is intensely moving, and whose individual stories are of the utmost social relevance. So whatever reservations I have about shouldn’t be mistaken for discouragement from watching its truly extraordinary narrative unfold.

This piece was written in response to Metro Cinema's inspired Reel Waste series, which runs from May 8th thru the 11th.

Return of the robotical son: Astro Boy

Based on Tezuka Osamu’s beloved manga and anime franchise, Astro Boy is set partly in the clean and luxurious floating Metro City, and partly in the vast trash heap that constitutes the planet below, a dystopian vision in which the segregation of the wealthy elite from the underprivileged majority has been pushed to extremes—as have issues of waste disposal. Dr. Tenma (voiced by Nicolas Cage) experiments with “pure positive” and “pure negative” energies, which gets war-giddy President Stone (Donald Sutherland) jazzed on inventing excuses for some ultra-high tech ass-kicking to help boost his chances at re-election.

During one such experiment, single parent Tenma’s precocious only-son Toby (Freddie Highmore) is killed. Tenma plummets into grief and determines to bring Toby back to life by fusing some of the kid’s DNA into the body of a powerful robot look-alike, complete with all of Toby’s memories. But Tenma quickly becomes horrified by his creation, this cheerful little golem with his dead son’s smile and voice and demands for love. The robot Toby, our Astro Boy, is finally stranded on Earth, where other robots are onto his artificial nature while humans assume he’s one of them. He hooks up with a band of orphans led by one Ham Egg (Nathan Lane), a futuristic Fagan who hosts monster robot rallies. So Astro Boy has to keep a low profile, pose as a normal boy, conceal from the world his jet-propelled feet, superhuman strength, and machine guns ready to pop out of his synthetic flesh. Something that proves difficult once he knows that President Stone is on his tail and calling for his super-charged heart.

I’m not sufficiently versed in existing Astro lore to be certain how much of Flushed Away director David Bowers’ feature version extrapolates, bastardizes or re-invigorates the source material, but there’s no denying how engaged I was in Astro Boy’s recasting of Pinocchio, not to mention Oliver Twist, the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, and Freaks, its merging of familiar myths with modern concerns of class, isolationism, technological ownership, the environment, and the residual effects of rampant consumerism. Of course the implications are all pretty explicit, which seems perfectly legitimate given that this movie, with its moral parables, its colorful, fluid imagery and its exciting, explosive set pieces, is clearly geared toward a family audience.

Despite some notable histrionics from Cage, the vocal performances go a long way toward making Astro Boy feel buoyant amidst several detours into tragedy and eerie questions about what it means to be human. Sutherland actually underplays President Stone’s obvious roots in Bush Jr., Kristen Bell gives surprising texture to Cora, Astro Boy’s teenage love interest—speaking of eerie questions—and Samuel L. Jackson has a lot of fun within the very limited range of vocal possibilities of Zog, the giant robot pal revived by Astro Boy. Fantastic and somewhat simplistic as Astro Boy is, there’s a pleasing degree of investment here in what the consequences of our continued exploration of virtual culture and the uses and abuses of artificial intelligence. Sure beats the hell out of Surrogates, in any case.

Waste, disposal: Gomorrah

Based on the 2006 Italian non-fiction bestseller that made its journalist author Roberto Saviano into both a literary sensation and fugitive from the mob at the age of 26, Gomorrah is a sprawling crime film involving a range of characters and narratives linked via their individual contributions to the poisoned ecosystem of the Camorra, the powerful, organized syndicate whose influence seeps deep into the social fabric of its native Naples, of Italy, and beyond. As directed by Matteo Garrone, this is a film that weaves its way through an immense grid of institutionalized crime as though it were charting an infernal floor plan in time. It’s an epic without the token grandiosity. An epic of pathos? Anyway, something uniquely monstrous, cold and fascinating, and not to be missed.

Waste and disposal form the bedrock of Gomorrah. The proliferation both literally and figuratively throughout is a product of the film’s structural and thematic elegance. That life is cheap here is made clear from the slaughter in the spa that kicks things off. The motives behind these killings are left unexplained because, really, what difference does it make? The carnage is conveyed flatly, the camera nonplussed by the display of a few more bodies being tossed into the mafia’s self-generating meat grinder. Garrone’s approach to the material emphasizes the network and durability of crime, not its allure, because its allure isn’t even necessary in a milieu that dutifully perpetuates its existence. The world of Gomorrah is deterministic. There is no ethnic charm. There is no glamour, no beauty, no opera to the violence, no catchy tunes or flamboyant editing or orgasmic geysers of blood. But there’s plenty horror and insight, too, or at the very least inspired exposé. You have to admire Martin Scorsese for coming on as presenter of Gomorrah for its North American release. It’s in many ways the antithesis of the sort of exhilarating, frenetic bloodletting found in several of Scorsese’s most celebrated films, but Scorsese’s smart enough to recognize that this is precisely why the film is vital. By taking distance from its subject, by capturing it in a documentary style conventionally alien to the genre, Gomorrah excavates the myth of the crime syndicate in a way I don’t think we’ve seen before.

There are two young punks (Marco Macor and Ciro Petrone) under the idiotic belief that they can work independently and even in opposition to the Camorra. They delight in stealing a secret stash of heavy weaponry, and a memorable sequence finds them stripping to their underpants and running along some sludge-lined shoreline blowing random shit up. There is a dour money handler (Gianfelice Imparato) who makes the rounds of the dismal housing complex that functions as the film’s nucleus, collecting and doling out payments. There’s a 13-year-old (Salvatore Abruzzese) who feels ready to be recruited into the Camorra, allowing himself to be shot in the chest while wearing a battered old ballistic vest. “Now you’re a man,” he’s told afterwards. He seems so young, but his youth’s put in perspective by a bleakly comical scene in which a large crew of little kids are employed to drive trucks whose pedals they can’t reach and whose dashboards they can’t see over. In one of the film’s most surprising narratives we find a compromised tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo) who risks his life to teach a warehouse full of Asians the finer points of haute design and construction. He’s escorted to the training facility in the trunk of a car. The tailor was for me the closer thing the film offers to identification, perhaps because of the character’s almost singular thread of integrity, perhaps for the simple fact that Cantalupo gives such a curiously detailed and intriguingly enigmatic performance.

My favourite part of Gomorrah however involves a businessman (Toni Servillo) and his apprentice (Carmine Paternoster) who find locations for their hired crews to illegally dump toxic waste. It’s rare to find modern stories that explore waste disposal as a major theme, through Don DeLillo’s Underworld serves as a brilliant prototype. Where we put the colossal heaps of poisonous trash is arguably one of the great taboo subjects, its invisibility—at least in wealthy countries—being essential to our false sense of peace with our surroundings. It’s an inspired metaphor that manifests here in some awesome and troubling imagery. The burial of undesirable matter is brutally echoed toward the film’s end, when the bodies of undesirable men are disposed of through similar means. I suppose the only hope we’re given that this state of affairs might change comes through the implication that, sooner or later, everything poorly interred will rise to the surface.