Waste, and Other Forms of Management @ NYC Anthology Film Archives
Program 5: WASTE, AND OTHER FORMS OF MANAGEMENT
Monday, March 17 @Anthology Film Archives
Pawel Wojtasik, Ernst Karel & Dana Levy in person for a post-screening discussion
Flaherty NYC at Anthology Film Archives: 32 Second Ave. (@2nd St.)
Tickets on sale at the box office day of screening.
New Work From Directors: Pawel Wojtasik, Toby Lee & Ernst Karel
Like Emily Post’s famous edict on social decorum, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home,the works below present studies in logistics, in performance, and in how to look the other way. Where are the boundaries of polite society drawn, of individual agency, and of the state? How do we legislate what gets seen and unseen, what is sensed and unsensed, saved and discarded, and how do we punish transgressors? Here, the boundaries of the state define statelessness, and what we deem to be waste contours the excesses of a material culture.
SOUP CAN
Director: Robert Russett (USA, 1967, 3 minutes, 16mm)
Restored print of Robert Russett’s 1967 short animation, courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.
OVERSEAS
Directors: Wichanon Somumjarn and Anocha Suwichakornpong (Thailand, 2012, 16 minutes)
This short video is set in Mahachai, a town less than an hour away from Bangkok known for its seafood processing industry. The town, geographically situated by the river, is the site of many factories and has the highest number of Burmese workers outside of Burma. It is estimated that as many as 300,000 Burmese reside in Mahachai. Most of the Burmese are working, both legally and illegally, in these factories. Just like any other day in Mahachai, Wawa Kai, a Burmese immigrant worker wakes up. She brushes her teeth and takes a cold shower. She goes to work at a factory where she grades squids and shrimps according to their sizes. But today she is not feeling well, and has to take the afternoon off.
LAST SUPPER
Directors: Mary Mattingly and Dana Levy (USA, 2011, 3 minutes)
A very short meditation on the environmental impacts of consumption and its attendant justifications.
FOUR BOYS, WHITE WHISKEY, AND GRILLED MOUSE
Directors: Wichanon Somumjarn (Thailand, 2009, 10 minutes)
One late afternoon at the rice paddies after the harvest, four boys turns a little shack into a recreation centre, complete with white whiskey, grilled mouse, and country music.
New Work From Directors: Pawel Wojtasik, Toby Lee & Ernst Karel
(Video, 2013, 23 minutes)
This video sheds light on this blind spot in our public consciousness through a meditative examination of waste. A visual and sonic exploration inside a recycling plant, the film makes visible a part of our material existence – the after-life of our waste – that usually goes unseen.
TRT: 60 minutes