The Labour of Trash Films
Agnès Varda, Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse ; Mai Iskander, Garbage Dreams ; and Lucy Walker, Waste-Land
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11416898 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kenneth W Harrow (0000-0002-5186-5130, Michigan State University, corresponding author), Kenneth Harrow (Michigan State University) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 71-89 |
| Publication date | 2020-11-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critical Arts (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0256-0046 • E-ISSN: 1992-6049 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02560046.2020.1850821 |
| OpenAlex | W3123070670 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 3 |
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
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Art · Art history · Bourgeoisie · Garbage · Literature · Media studies · Movie theater · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology · Social science · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · Engineering · Gender Studies · History · Law · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation
| Highly cited | No |
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