Locarno Film Festival 2022: ‘Matter Out of Place’ (Concorso Internazionale) | Review
The most recent cinematic and important film about our deteriorating earth. Nikolas Geyrhalter’s Matter Out of Place is a visually outstanding piece of art that needs to be seen.
“Matter Out Of Place refers to any object or impact not native to the immediate environment.” The opening description that defines the title and also the next 110 minutes of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s visually breathtaking ecological documentary, Matter Out of Place. Geyrhalter merely observes and frames the process of waste in different locations around the world from ski resorts in Switzerland to the Burning Man festival in Las Vegas. By observing these processes of waste from the beginning of disposal, pick-up, separation, and displacement of waste and material to the culmination of landfills and burning of the trash. Not only does this look at the process, but acts as a keenly social analysis of the treatment of class and environment through the film’s observation.
Structured through different locations for any given number of minutes, ranging from a couple of minutes to a quarter hour, varying short to long takes, Geyrhalter’s begins at juxtaposing landscapes of long spectacular mountain side shots with hard cuts to trash at the ground level. Combined with hard cuts are also slow processes of waste build up, such as a waste truck dropping off waste at a landfill presumable ten of miles away from the city to the mountainside in Nepal. What starts off as a small-scale waste landfill, begins to show the tedious process of multiple full trucks coming and going where they slowly disperse their trash, filling up the frame of the screen with trash. To that point, the waste it leaves not only on land, but the ocean is explored. Beach side locations receive plastic and miscellaneous trash on the shore while a section show scuba divers in the Maldives clean up trash from the bottom of the sea in large volumes. Using the screen that audiences are watching, from a clean slate to filling the frame with trash leaving an impactful moment by its filmmaking. I don’t believe he is asking viewers to suddenly become environmentalists, but to be aware of the scale and dangers that it is causing.
Where trash and environment meet, social settings clash as well. From the exquisite preparations of beach resorts to the third world country nature in Nepal, waste gets transported and disposed in several ways. Some areas may have indoor facilities to compact the trash with heavy machinery while others have to burn their trash on the edge of the town. These different methods speak volumes to the means of pollution control. With this gap in class and equipment in waste management, one can see the effects of a systematic and political issue adversely contributing to the environment.
With Matter out of Place, a phrase used in the last segment at a clean-up at the end of the Burning Man festival, one sees a gleaming opening for hope as they carefully organize and clean the aftermath of the event. A festival solely on the environment, the leader of the crew says “Don’t get attached to your matter out of place”, an optimistic coda to live by for the film. Geyrhalter’s focus on life-changing issues are before and beyond its time and in Matter out of Place, places him as one of the key figures in documentary filmmaking.
