The Labour of Trash Films: Agnès Varda, Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse; Mai Iskander, Garbage Dreams; and Lucy Walker, Waste-Land

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.