By Peter Tammer

The short film ‘Our Lady of the Rubbish’ (Dir. Cleeland, J., 2014) starts with a long shot of a Vietnamese woman sitting on a very low stool smashing and crushing aluminum cans for 2 minutes with a short-handled mallet. This activity takes place outside in an empty lot. Then we see her sifting through office binders, hospital folders and checking for and tearing the blank pages from note books. The following shot is of her giving money to a woman in a red jumper, presumably for rubbish which that woman has brought to her.

At about 3 mins, after the woman in red jumper has departed, the lady now communicates with other people who are loading tied bundles of cardboard into a truck. This is the first time we get a wider view of her workplace. A man in a green helmet passes close to the camera and later we’ll see he is her partner but we do not know this yet. Another woman arrives with a yoke over her shoulder which has two lots of rubbish dangling, one from each side. This is followed by a shot of more sorting and Our Lady squashing a bundle with her feet.

Four minutes have elapsed and we know nothing more about this woman, no name, no details of her life outside this place.

A large bundle of cardboard is weighed on a small scale and then taken by a chap in a green jacket and thrown into the back of the truck. At 4.30 we get another wide shot revealing a different view of the work site where similar action occurs. Further precarious weighing of large items teetering on the small scale.

A woman we glimpsed earlier sits on a makeshift couch under an umbrella and takes notes. Maybe she’s counting the sales?

At 5.46 the man is working with different pieces of metal frames while he converses over his shoulder, with another garbage collector. She’s sitting on the low stool with aluminum cans at her feet. He’s separating small electronic parts from a frame using a cleaver and screwdriver. All this time we hear them conversing, but one gets the feeling that whatever they are saying is not “consequential”… i.e., if you knew what they were saying it would not significantly change the film’s meaning.

Close-up of the empty scale elevates to a wider shot of the place and it seems it’s time for a lunch break. This time we get a different view, walls are revealed which have some vines growing on them. Before everything was just plain concrete.

From 6.43 we see her partner seated on the concrete disassembling a pedestal fan. He’s chatting with Our Lady, off-camera. Then a shot of his shoe and green sock. Back to her and she’s tying another large bundle of cardboard.

At about the 8 minute mark a few bundles remain on the pad in sacks and Our Lady is sweeping the concrete with a straw broom. Some large panes of glass lean against the concrete wall behind her. At 8.40, her partner is standing next to a tricycle cart at the kerbside. Then he’s seen tying the remaining sacks onto that cart in the late afternoon sun. Our Lady is assisting from the other side of the cart. Then she comes to the rear of the cart and together they tie the load down.

At 9.35 they put the cart on the road and Our Lady pulls it away from the site into the traffic. She disappears around a corner. In the late afternoon light this makes a nice picturesque scene.

Her partner is back doing more sweeping, it’s getting dark. There are still some packages remaining. He throws the broom down. Day is done!

Well that’s what I saw and heard. So simple, so perfunctory and so low-key.

Why do I respect this film so much?

The filmmaker has covered this day’s work for these two people in a rather “detached” manner, by which I mean, he’s not loading us with value judgments. Okay, there are a couple of moments , e.g., the small scale overloaded with a huge pile of stuff. Also the man’s green sock in his worn slipper or shoe… but he doesn’t go out of his way to “make points” about what they are doing or how they are doing it. He’s recording them at their work.

He doesn’t give us a “commentary” such as a narration which would give a context and which would be full of first-world bias, he allows viewers to form their own judgement based upon what they see. And what I saw was this: two people, a man and a woman, working very hard to make a living by sorting rubbish presumably for on-selling to recycling plants in a society which produces a great deal of waste. Some people bring them their waste for free, others sell it to them, and between the two, after a hard day’s work they surely must make some return for what they have done to pay the rent, to buy food for themselves (and their family?) and make it worthwhile to come back the next day and start all over again. Is this for the rest of their lives? And how long have they been doing this?

I deeply respect this work. The filmmaker has shown great patience to follow the subjects so tenaciously, all day, and to take the viewer inside their world. It is troubling to view, because what they are doing is at once both so good (recycling) and so futile (what a way to “live” a lifetime!) and also by extrapolation, that this sort of activity is going on all over the city, the country and the whole of the Third World.

We know nothing of the reasons which have brought the subjects to this place in their lives. All the questions raised in this film are for us to ask ourselves and for us to find the answers to our questions by using our imagination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LCPaU52Bts

Rice and Knives

‘Rice and Knives’ (Dir. Cleeland, J., 2016) is a beautiful film from the opening shot to the end. There are maybe a few shots cut short too early and maybe the sequence on making the knives could have been longer or more detailed.

Set in the Vietnamese countryside, a superb tropical paradise far removed from the ravages of the Vietnam wars from 1940 – 1970, this film gives a picture of pastoral life. It has many components from our modern world of machinery, e.g., trucks and other vehicles, but it is like a time-warp. If not for the modern machinery you could be right back 500 years before. A time where people worked communally in the paddy fields growing great crops and living at a really quiet and sedate pace.

Once again, this film is beautifully observed. Viewers are free to interpret this film any way they like. It presents the landscape, Phuc Sen village, the people, just as they are.

This film is accompanied by a superb choice of music for the sound track which reflects the timeless traditions of farming in the Viet countryside. Beautifully constructed stone walls and paddy fields which are incredibly labour-intensive indicate that this way of life is not a short-term fleeting proposition. It represents a culture of millenia!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-24G2-2Kzg&t=5s