![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The notion of trash films, trashy performances, has marked Western film heavily. The emphasis often falls on disrupting an established order, “troubling the waters,” through anti-bourgeois language and images, through revolutionary class struggles. In this paper, I am interested in seeing how the features involving trash, disorder, and social struggle, accord with attempts to create a new cinematic language to convey positive visual and narrative values for global South cinema. To accomplish this I place the work of a paradigmatic French auteur, Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse in relationship with two films set in Brazil and Egypt, Mai Iskander’s Garbage Dreams and Lucy Walker’s Waste-Land. This paper presents trash as having some agency, like that of the vagabond, so as to illustrate how the world of art and cinema, and trash cinema, are tied to a neoliberal or global agenda—one in which that agenda encounters, with equal force, trash’s resistance to the framings of value that reduce trash and its pickers to the lowest of statuses.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Rancière’s writings are marked by a sensibility that distinguishes those outside the spheres of power and control and those who “police” the orders of society, especially by constructing dominant values that serve their interest. The key phrase I will turn to is the “partage du sensible,” the partage—sharing, division, parcelling out—of what seems to be the obvious, normal features of reality. The “partage” is partial, leans toward the controlling powers, and leaves excluded figures to try to get by. This paper is about those who struggle to get by, the “gleaners” or trash pickers of the world: those from the global north, whose gleanings are relatively easy to come by, and those whose lives are metaphorically and literally those of trash pickers.
2 In Agamben’s. Sovereign power and bare life (Citation1998) he distinguishes zoe, bare life, from bios. The former is “bare” because there is no quality or appurtenance that gives it value or protects it, as a citizen, with bios would have. I think of it as the life of inmates of concentration camps whose deaths count as nothing,
3 It would be difficult to find an approach to cinema and life that differs more from that of Agnès Varda than the documentary titled Zabbaleen: Trash Town (Artyom Somov Citation2016). Mai Iskander’s Garbage Dreams (Citation2009) is also a documentary about Zabbaleen, the residents of Mokkadam, the “city” of trash that sits outside Cairo and houses thousands of trashpickers. Somov wants to tell us about this so-called fascinating story by showing how the garbage men collect the city trash, sort it, bring 80% to recycling, and manage a life of struggle. Here is the blurb they produced for the film: “Tens of thousands of people live in Zabbaleen [sic], on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, they all make a living out of recycling the entire capital city’s refuse. Their whole town is practically a giant dump and it provides them with almost everything they need: from kids’ toys to fodder for livestock. Even their pigs play an important part in recycling food waste. Most important of all though, the dump provides livelihoods for the people of Zabbaleen [sic].” https://rtd.rt.com/films/zabbaleen-trash-town/#about_film. The filmmakers produce the images, information, comprehension, and emotional charge for the audience to receive. All this done with a voice of god voiceover, and objective point-of-view camerawork, at times literally providing crane shots that deliver us the truth/images from on high, at a distance from the smell and rot of the trash/street/lives below. Zabbaleen: Trash Town was made in response to the economics of neoliberalism that drive the poor to desperation as normal labour and industrial production have failed to provide development in their countries.
4 Famously, Michel Foucault marks the biopolitics of ordering in his History of Sexuality, as seen in his well-known example of the “edges” of the field where pre-ordered, pre-regulated gay sexuality might have been found:at the edges of the fields. The same edges where the gleanings were not hedged by the careful limits placed over the ordered spaces:
One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there, depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called “curdled milk”. So he was pointed out by the girl's parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two of her experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all. (31)
5 Louis Pons. French collage artist of the 1960s and later whose assemblages and reliefs are made from “recuperated” articles, found art, trash … . The transformation from discarded to art, the theme also of this paper. https://forum.psrabel.com/beitraege/pons/pons2.html.
Jean LaPlanche: “major psychoanalytical theorist who directed the translations of Freud’s works into French, and was an important mediator of Lacanian analysis, described as the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day” (Osborne and Fletcher Citation2000). He also happened to make wine, as Varda playfully indicated.