Nikolaus Geyrhalter is the great essayist of the image, a filmmaker who takes strong positions that are not conveyed by words. It’s no different with “Matter out of Place”. On Wednesday, the new documentary film regarding people and rubbish celebrated its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival. It’s a visually stunning, serene look at those places on earth that are suffocating in garbage – from the peaks of the Alps to the bottom of the sea.
Nikolaus Geyrhalter, who is also responsible for the camera work on “Matter out of Place”, shows landscapes that are far removed from their original appearance in planned sequences that are (minutes) long even by his standards. The decline of civilization has become the determining factor here – and thus the title, which designates a thing not belonging to the respective place, is almost undermined. It seems as if nature can no longer be separated from waste.
Geyrhalter’s images are apocalyptic and idyllic in their potency. The garbage has already buried itself in our environment. It seems almost aesthetic how the plastic forms on the banks of a mountain lake. And yet, of course, the remnants of a throwaway society don’t always come across as appealing.
Born in Vienna in 1972, he accompanies beach cleaners in Albania, films garbage sorting plants in Austria, portrays garbage divers off Greece or shows in the Maldives how palm paradise and garbage juggernaut have apparently inseparably merged. He depicts a gigantic landfill in Nepal, in which a constant, never-ending stream of supplies is creating a new mountain on the roof of the world. And he shows excavations in Solothurn that show that car tires and plastic bags aren’t slumbering beneath the supposedly green Swiss meadows, rather than valuable humus. The garbage isn’t gone. He just disappeared from sight in this filled-in landfill.
Despite all the sadness of the subject, “Matter out of Place” does not lack the eye for the oddities that characterize Geyrhalter’s work – when, for example, the garbage truck is transported away from the Swiss Bettmeralp hanging under the gondola. And when, at the end, the Burning Man Festival in Nevada creates an almost utopian alternative world in which the desert is cleaned of all human traces with a broom at the end of the event.
As always in the works of Nikolaus Geyrhalter, “Matter out of Place” explains nothing. The film lets the situations stand on their own and unfold their effect. It is a poetic approach that meets the viewer at eye level and shows them how far we have already irretrievably changed the course of the world. Such a crap.
(S E R V I C E – www.locarnofestival.ch ; https://matteroutofplace.at)