At one point in “Waste Land,” the new documentary from “Blindsight” director Lucy Walker, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz describes the way people view art in a gallery, moving toward and then away from the painting. “You move forward, you see the materials, you move back, you see the image,” he said. “You move forward, you see the materials, you move back … you see the idea.”
The film follows the same hypnotic pattern, unafraid to move forward and back, from materials to images and then beyond. “Waste Land” focuses on Muniz’s mission to create art in the largest garbage dump in the world, Jardim Gramacho, which is located in Rio de Janeiro. A place where bodies from surrounding drug wars sometimes end up, the area is as inhospitable as you could imagine. Sifting through the refuse of Brazilian life are hundreds of catadores, or pickers, who make a living gathering recyclables from the vast piles of garbage that arrive every day.
They are a motley crew with personalities and attitudes as varied as the items they pick. There is Tiaõ, president of the Association of Collectors of the Metropolitan Landfill of Jardim Gramacho, a group that fights for the rights of the pickers. There is Isis, who hates the work and wants a better life. There is Zumbi, who collects discarded books and dreams of setting up a library for the pickers. There are around 1,300 pickers in Jardim Gramacho, but the one surprising thing they all have in common is pride. Whether it is pride at having avoided prostitution or pride at making the best of their poverty or pride at simply supporting their families, the pickers are very proud of what they do, even if they hate it.
The embodiment of this pride is Valter, an elderly man who appears in the film from time to time, dispensing wisdom to his fellow catadores. Valter manages to love what he does and believes that every little action and object is important. A figure in the spirit of Don Quixote, he seeks beauty even in the supreme ugliness of Jardim Gramacho. Muniz takes on a similar mission as he hires a small group of pickers to create murals out of garbage based on photographs of themselves. His ambition is to test the power of art, to introduce these people to another world and to allow them to see themselves in it.
And yet, art has its limits, and that is part of what makes “Waste Land” so fascinating. Is it enough to make art or does the artist bear responsibility for his subjects? How far does the power of art truly extend? Can these questions even be answered?
In “Waste Land,” there are moments of disgust, moments of sadness and sequences of extraordinary exhilaration. After a while, we realize that we are watching something like an expression and examination of the human spirit. And if parts of it are slightly jumbled … well, that’s just life. These people, simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, are what we take from the film more than anything else. “Waste Land” shows us a world and a way of life that we can only begin to imagine. There are materials and images, people and ideas. Pride and despair. Forward and back.