Icarus Films: Matter Out of Place

Waste on the shores, waste on the mountains. On ocean floors and deep down in the earth. The term “matter out of place” refers to objects in a place they originally do not belong to. And there are many such objects in the places Nikolaus Geyrhalter visits for this film.

In his unique imagery consisting of minutely composed pictures, the director traces immense amounts of waste across our planet. He travels from the mountain tops of Switzerland to the coasts of Greece and Albania, into an Austrian refuse incinerator and then to Nepal and the Maldives, and finally to the deserts of Nevada.

MATTER OUT OF PLACE is about human-made refuse, which surrounds us all the time, everywhere. On his journey, Geyrhalter illustrates the sheer endless struggle of people to gain control over the vast amounts of waste that we produce every single day. Collecting, shredding, burning, burying – a Sisyphean task, which ostensibly solves the global problem of rubbish that is stealthily growing.

“A visually gorgeous, even pristine, movie about, well, garbage. ... But this is no navel-gazing exercise in aestheticizing detritus or finding beauty in ugly places. Rather, Geyrhalter’s keen, rigorous tableaux provoke us to think about the massive global industry required to deal with the rubbish we so casually generate in our everyday culture of disposability.” —The New York Times

“Mesmerizing and strangely beautiful.” —Variety

“Imbues the landscape with a political charge, exploring its defilement as the inherent cost of capitalism... MATTER OUT OF PLACE appropriately captures the inexorable issue of waste and confronts our struggle to surmount it.” —BOMB Magazine

“With static camerawork that accentuates the artfulness of his shot compositions, Geyrhalter finds in garbage a sublimity, disturbingly beautiful in its sheer magnitude.” —Slant Magazine