Following Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s award-winning ecological alarm bells documentary Earth, it makes sense he’d turn his patient, exquisitely composed attentions to the global rubbish emergency. Matter Out of Place (aka MOOP, a term denoting any detritus not native to its immediate environment) wends its way across continents, from Switzerland to the Maldives, Nevada to Nepal, registering in neutral, noninterventionist images the deeply disquieting ubiquity of trash in places most of us would think were pristine. Streams draped with ghostly plastics and ocean beds encrusted with waste give way to community clean-ups and recycling plants; Geyrhalter’s style is to present these scenes without commentary, allowing the power of the images themselves together with fine editing and superb sound to convey a message we all know yet tend to push aside. As with his previous documentaries (including The Border Fence and Our Daily Bread), the Austrian director’s latest is likely to find a warm welcome at festivals worldwide.
The first shot is of a stunning narrow lake high up in the Alps, nestled between snow-dusted mountains and appearing to be purity incarnate. That notion is exploded with the next shot, of the shoreline choked with plastics, an especially shocking image given that there’s no habitation in sight. Next is a nondescript grass-covered field in Solothurn where a large-scale excavator breaks the topsoil, revealing by the second scoop a jumble of refuse, from tires to plastics to newspapers, almost none of it degraded. Two men overseeing the operation discuss with each other how the area was a landfill in the 1970s and was even later used for agricultural purposes.
In Albania, “Volunteers for a Clean Homeland” pick up litter from the coastline, and in Nepal, municipal workers go house to house collecting garbage, whereas at an Alpine village the waste is pre-sorted into recyclable categories. The crystalline pale blue waters of the Maldives appear unblemished at first, but the second shot reveals plastics strewn about a palm grove and in the next the staff of a luxury resort patrol the beach gathering manmade flotsam. Every location is awash in what we nonchalantly toss away, even beneath the Greek seas, where a group of scuba divers using large white bags floated by balloons pluck out trash.
Many of the images are genuinely hypnotic thanks to Geyrhalter’s unerring eye for perfect compositions, yet at times he pushes a scene’s length beyond necessity, such as an overhead shot of mixed refuse – wooden chairs, a mattress, a blue plastic basket, etc. – being sucked into an industrial masher that tosses the items around and then grinds them down. Recycling plants like that one and an incineration facility in Austria are the First World’s strategy for dealing with the global garbage crisis, whereas in developing nations the undifferentiated refuse is dumped onto large landfills where the most impoverished citizens cherry-pick items that might earn them a few cents. Matter Out of Place ends at the Burning Man festival, whose participants briefly take over the Nevada desert and then responsibly collect the trash and return the sands to their original state.
That final sequence is meant to offer a smidgen of hope, that we as individuals can do our fair share to reduce our disposable culture’s negative impact. Yet there’s something problematic about putting a group of environmentally aware American ravers on the same uncommented level as people in the global south who lack access to adequate waste removal. Because Geyrhalter chooses a non-interventionist approach he runs the risk of disregarding the significant differences between nations, and while his films are of course deeply political in spirit, they rely for their audience on a group of like-minded people already committed to the cause. Matter Out of Place has no room for a discussion of how mafias control garbage collection in so many countries, nor is there a look-in on illegal dumping, lip-service recycling, the way class dictates the frequency of pick-ups, life expectancy issues among sanitation workers, and a host of other interrelated issues.
That’s not to say a documentary about the global garbage crisis needs to cover all those elements – it would require a miniseries at the least. But without any nod to a host of problems, combined with a sense of beautified equivalency, Geyrhalter’s film risks being seen as an aestheticized cinema essay more than a call to arms. On a purely visual level however, it’s a beauty, and once again the director, who’s also the d.p., has a knack for finding exactly the right spot to set up his stationary camera, keenly aware of light and movement (underwater photography by Marios Zervas is also magical). Sound design and Dolby Atmos recording is also a crucial element that makes Matter Out of Place a truly cinematic experience.
Director: Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Producers: Michael Kitzberger, Wolfgang Widerhofer, Markus Glaser, Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Executive producer: Michael Kitzberger
Cinematography: Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Underwater filming: Marios Zervas
Editing: Samira Ghahremani
Additional editing: Michael Palm
Sound: Sergey Martynyuk, Nora Czamler
Production company: Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion (Austria), in collaboration with ORF, ZDF/3sat
World sales: Autlook Filmsales
Venue: Locarno (International Competition)
In Swiss German, Albanian, Nepali, English
105 minutes
