Locarno Film Festival 2022 | Matter Out of Place

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter often explores humankind’s devastating impact on our planet. In Earth (2019), he looked at construction; in Homo Sapiens (2016), abandoned buildings. Now, in Matter Out of Place, Geyrhalter pivots his focus to garbage and waste management.

The term Matter Out of Place (MOOP) refers to “any object or impact not native to the immediate environment.” It’s quite a broad definition, but Geyrhalter applies it here specifically to the garbage littering every corner of the natural world, from the peaks of mountains to the bottoms of oceans.

Geyrhalter opens with a stunning view of a snow-swept valley, a crisp blue river winding through it. A closer inspection shows its banks riddled with garbage, no clear ground in sight. This sequence sets up a pattern throughout the film in which Geyrhalter employs aerial landscape shots followed immediately by close-ups of the garbage scattered in droves.

While the film captures a few community-based litter clean-up efforts, whether on beaches, in deserts or underwater, it primarily focuses on regional garbage collection and waste management processes in different parts of the world. The film shows the detailed dispersion of garbage from home to landfill sites or incinerator plants via truck, boat and even gondola.

There is no voiceover narration and almost no dialogue in the film, which instead relies on the images to speak for themselves. While Geyrhalter employs this technique to allow audiences to form their own thoughts and conclusions, in many ways it’s a shame because we’re left with a hundred questions without the means to answer them. For example, around the world we consistently see workers sorting plastic bags out of landfills — why plastic bags specifically, when the mounds of other plastics are left unsorted? Which waste management process is considered better (or at least, the lesser evil) ecologically and economically? No theories are offered, and there are too many big questions within too vast a topic to expect viewers to do their own research or make informed conclusions. The film doesn’t motivate us to find answers, it simply presents a depressingly overwhelming problem. It’s a frustrating approach at times.

In fact, one of the most intriguing segments in the film is also the only one with insightful conversation. In an empty field, a bulldozer uncovers tons of buried garbage while two men discuss the find. They remark that demolished buildings and factories often get rid of their waste by burying it — the old ‘out of sight, out of mind’ strategy. The underground landfills are discovered when the fields are later used for agriculture, and farmers dig up plastic alongside their potatoes. The unearthed garbage remains almost wholly preserved because, as one of the men explains, when material is buried underground and the groundwater dams up, almost no degradation takes place. It’s an extremely informative sequence that stands apart from the rest of the film.

A particularly effective technique in Matter Out of Place is the use of compare and contrast. It highlights how climate, economic resources and community engagement impact garbage processes differently around the world. In the snowy Alps, a gondola transports a garbage truck down the mountain. In a tropical region, resort workers comb the beach for garbage and transport it to the mainland by boat. A line of trucks in the developing world struggle through deep muddy terrain to a landfill site, while in the developed world we witness each step of disposal at a massive incinerator plant. Around the globe, garbage is burned, buried, or added to an overflowing heap. Some of it is accidentally lost along the way, ending up underwater or on a beach where motivated individuals attempt to clean it up.

The film concludes at the Burning Man festival in Nevada, contrasting the nighttime crowds of partygoers with the next morning’s empty desert. Volunteers sweep the sand looking for pieces of matter out of place, following a mantra of “leave no trace.” Although it’s encouraging to watch their dedication to the task, it’s simultaneously sobering knowing those pieces they pick up will still end up on the ground, just in another location amidst a larger heap.

Matter Out of Place premieres at this year’s Locarno Film Festival in the Concorso Internazionale category.