일상의 초상, 그리고 쓰레기의 정치학: <웨이스트 랜드>와 무니스의 작품을 중심으로

Abstract

Documentary constitutes a social art by contributing to the production of social discourses. Nevertheless, documentary as a representative genre is not free from the calling of truthful representation of the subject. Production of discourses and the truthful representation might suffice to explain the politics of documentary, which, on the other hand, is rather reductive, failing to recognize its possible clout to the pre-existing system of value and sense. This paper argues the truthful representation documentaries pursue should not belie totality without possibility of change, in order to ask in return the aesthetics and sociology of identification might be a capitalist apparatus designed to maintain such pre-existing value system. Therefore, it is worthwhile to examine possibilities and limitations in which documentary portrays ordinary lives, rather than to attend to either individual or collective identities in its representations. For it is also true that pain of people repeats and continues, despite the fact that various representations of ‘demos’ draw attention, elicit proper recognition, and even unleash storms of revolution. Waste Land (2010, Lucy Walker) is surely a political film. But the politics is more salient in the aesthetic experiments it represents. In other words, the film is political, not because it represents the nameless, people without share, but because the subject of the representation mediates themselves as historical subjects demanding changes in purpose-centered system of value ever more reinforced in the late capitalism. For this argument, this essay points out that the controversy on the possibility of change of reality of catadors raised by Waste Land proves limitations of sociology of totality and identity. Which is to contend that the reality highlighting such system of classification be constrained by artificial identity. This is clearly revealed by Muniz’s attempts and experiments and by the politics of garbage the film foregrounds. Such politics will permit new system of value other than the one dominating the current order between the visible and the invisible. Waste Land, like many other documentaries, represents people who work in blind corners, and reveals that only these people, with or without the knowledge of dominant ideology and its massive structure, bear dreams for a new world beyond the system of senses, beyond the fictional reality toward a new history.