Waste Land is a documentary that kills two birds with one stone when it comes to making white people feel good about themselves. It's about art and social justice! Yay! It follows Brazilian star artist (startist?) Vic Muniz as he goes to Jardim Gramacho (literally meaning Gramacho Garden... no so much...), the landfill outside of Rio de Janeiro and one of the world's biggest landfills, makes art with the poor pickers who sort through the mounds of junk looking for recyclables.
Muniz, who was born in Brazil, talks about how he sorted through garbage himself after he arrived in the United States 20-some years ago. The work was humbling, to be sure, but also get him inspiration to make the interesting art he makes. He normally takes found objects, sometimes garbage, sometimes sugar, sometimes toys, sometimes chocolate sauce and makes representational images with them before shooting photographs of these arrangements. He is best known for taking well known paintings and pictures by other artists and re-making them out of these found objects. It's a very interesting process and one that I like a lot aesthetically. I think it's fascinating how he removes the viewer from the subject of the work by at least one degree. This is a very clever post-modern process and it does it beautifully.
So back on the ground in Gramacho, Muniz spends a few days walking around the heaps of trash interviewing the pickers there and figuring out who runs what. He meets a few of the labor leaders who are organizing the pickers into an ad hoc union, he meets a man who has such a positive outlook on life you wouldn't know he worked in smelly junk for a living, he meets a woman who has three kids and works as a picker because she can't find any other work.
He takes some portraits of these people, and then sets to working with them to gather certain kinds of garbage that they will use to make the works. I like how in the process of making the art, Muniz (and the directors) shows us how these people do what they do so effectively. He shows us how when they need plastic water bottles the people can find them and when they need rubber tires they can get those too.
Ultimately he has the group of subjects lay the garbage down on the floor of a big warehouse where the image of their portraits is shown on the ground. They place the items, with his helpful instruction, so they end up with large-scare pictures of themselves. Through the process, the pickers learn a new respect for one another and for the beauty in the world.
This is a nice story, but is a bit annoying, to be honest. I like what Muniz does, and I think he does it with an extreme humility and honor throughout. I think the filmmakrs Lucy Walker, Karen Harley and Joao Jardim (Jesus! They needed three directors!) think that what is being done here is really important, when really it's just an art project. Sadly most of these people will ultimately have to go back to the landfill at some point in the future and most of them suffer from all sorts of diseases they get from working in such filth (from metal poisoning to lung disease, not to mention the terrible education and social services they don't receive). It's a bit annoying that this shows us a window into a really terrible thing and we see a non-solution to dealing with it. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think a more polemical view of the situation would have been good. Why not pressure the Brazilian government (which is experiencing unparalleled growth currently) to help these people better?
This film is very reminiscent of another trash documentary from 2010, Garbage Dreams. That was more interesting because it approached the issue from a more sociopolitical point of view. I thought it showed more about Egyptian society than this film showed about Brazilian society. Neither one is wonderful, but aside from Muniz, whose art and personality are fantastic, there is not much here that's very good.
Stars: 2 of 4
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