MATTER OUT OF PLACE

Nikolaus Geyrhalter / Austria / 2022 / 110 min

What will future archaeologists think when they dig their way back to our time? One thing is certain: They will have to dig deep to reach through the rubbish heaps. A sensory report from the autumn of the Anthropocene Age.

The unimaginable amounts of waste produced around the world every day can tell us a lot about ourselves and our impact on the world, and Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s objective look at the Anthropocene Age is ideal for that task. Taking the banal debris of civilisation as its object, ‘Matter Out of Place’ is a sensory journey through a dizzying pattern of (over)production and exclusion. Monumental volumes of physical materials are produced at a pace that the omnivorous machines of modern incinerators and overflowing landfills can barely manage to devour. Few filmmakers have the eye to interject that special unsettling distance that allows us to see ourselves from the outside with alien eyes.