“Many objects remain unnoticed simply because it never occurs to us to look their way. Most people turn their backs on garbage cans, the dirt underfoot, the waste they leave behind. Films have no such inhibitions; on the contrary, what we ordinarily prefer to ignore proves attractive to them precisely because of this common neglect.” 

- Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film

This seminar takes the concept of waste as a capacious term for interrogating how cinema captures, produces, reproduces, and recuperates uselessness or excess in the structure of its images and narratives. In this seminar, we are invested in unpacking what use value “waste,” “trash,” “garbage,” “detritus,” and “junk” have as terms that conceptually underpin form and themes of film beyond “trash cinema” as a category for films that fall far below accepted technical and aesthetic standards for filmmaking. In Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, for example, Mount Etna’s barren wasteland of volcanic ash reappears throughout the film as a mystical portent that assumes, for James Quandt, meanings that alternately allude to spiritual desolation, the entropic impulses underlying the façade of bourgeois stability, or, quite simply, death. In a more literal sense, waste management operates as an organizing principle in The Sopranos, as Tony’s supposedly legitimate business obscures the disposal of bodies in the marshy backwaters of the former Fresh Kills landfill that once held the dubious honour of being the world’s largest dumping ground, while garbage collection as vocation correlates to a spiral of abjection in João Pedro Rodrigues’ O Fantasma. While Guy Barefoot discusses how the Kuchar Brothers deliberately cultivate a trash aesthetic that works with their budgetary constraints rather than an accidental product of them, Juan A. Suárez argues that a queer materiality emerges in their melding of kitsch plastic mise-en-scènes with an excremental corporeality. Going beyond the films’ deviations from (and parody of) Hollywood and art cinema alike, Suárez instead turns to the material base of the profilmic to position plastic’s “crass objecthood” and bodily effluvia as queer unruliness. The abundance of trash in Joker’s mise-en-scène prompts Kartik Nair to interrogate how the film’s creators were inspired by the the garbage-filled cityscapes of the 1980s during sanitation worker strikes, illuminating how histories of labour struggles inform the setting of Gotham as degraded as well as leaving “spectral traces of labour” that can be detected in its construction. 

We invite papers that take up “waste” in relation to film and media in similarly generative ways.