The Aesthetics of Poverty: Representing the Homeless versus the Houseless
Film and History Annual Conference
Milwaukee, WI
Presented November, 2017
The American Dream, at its most succinct, is a collective quest for private land ownership. The hidden power structure that lies at the heart of the American Dream is the perverse financial game that pits people against one another for personal space, and a political system that privileges the propertied class. The dreams conjured by Hollywood have both reflected and questioned notions of poverty, class, and ownership that ground this fantasy. One of the more effective ways film has critiqued the dehumanizing elements of this pervading ideology is through the homeless figure. The narrative trajectory of the character without a home has provided an entry point to exploring our cultural attitudes toward hospitality, community, and wealth, but it has also trivialized the pain and suffering affiliated with homelessness in favor of a glossy romantic portrayal. Documentaries, too, may objectify their subjects and classify them as a social problem to be fixed. There are, of course, notable exceptions. There are those films that aim to respect poverty in its manifold complexity while questioning the systemic forces that produce it. The first aim of this paper is to discuss how the films Above and Below, Samsara, and The Gleaners and I, present innovative models for critiquing standardized practices of representing poverty through the nonfiction form.
While each of these nonfiction films varies greatly in style and aesthetic, they share a central thesis: The degradation of home on a planetary scale, that is, the declining health of the environment, is the outcome of an exploitative economic system. These films, in their own ways, express the moral implications of an ideology wholly obsessed with land possession through drawing the connections between people living in poverty and an impoverished planet. The immorality of the American Dream, or of neoliberalism, they argue, is located in the conflation of home with house ownership, and the neglect of one’s neighbor through the image of the white picket fence. The rhetoric of political leaders may mobilize conceptions of home not only to ideologically reproduce capitalism but to also legitimize imperial nationalism. The lofty construct of a national homeland disregards the violence suffered by those targeted as “foreign.” Iris Marion Young notes that home is “a nostalgic longing for an impossible security and comfort, a longing bought at the expense of women and of those constructed as Others, strangers, not-home, in order to secure this fantasy of a unified identity.”[1]
The second and final aim of this paper is to shift the conversation of homelessness from the sphere of representation to the politics of production: Does film provide a site of critical resistance, or does it invariably become a form of pseudo-activism in which citizenship is supplanted with viewership? Is the democratic enterprise of a film wholly negated by the fact that its material is organized by the lone figure of the Director, who may belong to a different class than the film’s subjects? Can film, a commercial product entrenched in a capitalist economic system, properly call for social-structural change? These are some of the questions we consider at BCCTV, a video arts collective that is located at the Bud Clark Commons Houseless Service Center in Portland, Oregon. BCCTV has become a community of makers that help to promote each other's artistic development and expression that isn’t bound to one’s housing status. A space like BCCTV places primacy on the side of production, that is, the process of filmmaking, rather than representation to activate care and solidarity. Now, let me turn to those films that subvert standardized representations of poverty and conceptions of home.
Nicolas Steiner’s 2015 Above and Below is a nonfiction film that follows five individuals and their atypical “off-the-grid” lifestyles in desolate American landscapes, from the deserts of California and of Utah to the flood channels and underground tunnels of Las Vegas. We are shown rather than told via formal interviews how “home” to these individuals is not the product of a physical structure but is rather a sense of protected intimacy. The film provides a distinction between “houseless” and “homeless,” with “houseless” being a marker that assumes the presence of community, and “homeless” being a marker of both having nowhere to sleep and lacking affiliative bonds. While three of the subjects of the film are wholly alone and isolated because of the location of their habitats, they do not consider themselves homeless. They are each attuned to their sense of space in a cosmological context. Even April, one of the subjects of the film who has enrolled in a Mars Desert Research outpost, admits that her desire to leave Earth and travel to another planet, if even only in a simulated form, is to become grateful for the life-giving elements that only Earth provides.
The multifarious associations the film produces between home, dreams, and poverty beckon the phenomenological musings of Gaston Bachelard. “All strongly terrestrial beings,” he writes, “are subject to the attraction of an aerial, celestial world.”[2] The film indicates that we all trod the line between the spiritual and the terrestrial. Steiner aims to reproduce the naïve wonder we feel when finding a nest as a child, a feeling that Bachelard idealizes in his Poetics of Space. Additionally, it performs what Bachelard terms a “topoanalysis,” a psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.[3] The camera connects the seemingly isolated people through the admonishment of their upward celestial gazes.
The inner intensity and richness of the lives we are following in the various obscure landscapes are heightened when they are juxtaposed with shots of Las Vegas in all of its capitalist excess. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard notes that to the U.S. Las Vegas provides “a miniature representation” of the infinite length of its imperial power.[4] Above and Below’s critique unfolds similarly but through a theological lens. The fixation on the purchase of real estate that grounds the American Dream figures a selfish pursuit of having one’s own kingdom to rule. In his book The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber indicates that we still use the term “real” in real estate like the Spanish “real,” meaning “royal, belonging to the king.”[5] The common phrase “king of one’s own castle” reflects the ethical framework that the American Dream produces. The care of others and of space is overruled in favor of self-preservation. It looks at space solely as a territory worth possessing and at Others, even one’s neighbors, as subjects to be conquered. In their article “Ruinopolis,” Julia Hell and George Steinmetz conclude that in Las Vegas “the external world is swallowed up and brought home.” “Bring the world’s capitals, monuments and great buildings back to the US and rescaling them to fit into a single city is a symbolic gesture of world domination.”[6] Las Vegas epitomizes the wish fulfillment of the American Dream not only on the macroscopic, societal scale, that is, through symbolically encasing other kingdoms under the purview of the U.S., but also on the microscopic, individual scale through the personal accumulation of wealth for more wealth.
If Las Vegas represents a society that dreams of self-governed kingdoms, then the film’s subjects share a secular version of the kingdom of God, one that draws upon Bachelard’s idea of “protected intimacy in immensity.”[7] Kingdom is conceived of as home on a planetary scale. It embodies what Peter Sloterdijk calls a psychospherical divine encompassment, an immunizing totality that provides everyone with the feeling of belonging.[8] The film’s reverence for the bizarre habitats reflects the thesis that an ethics of care and attunement to other people’s suffering begins with an appreciation of the world as our shared home. Dreams of sleeping safely when we abandon ourselves to the care of others should be prioritized over dreams of ownership.
Rather than labeling and presenting the individuals under stereotypes such as the crack head, illegal immigrant, alcoholic, or post-traumatic combat vet, Above and Below presents each of the subjects as caring thinkers. These individuals may be houseless, but they are not powerless. Their homes are figured as an artistic outlet, a way to externalize their identities and feel integrated in space. The habitats themselves are made through recycled materials, found furniture, or dumpster diving treasures. Providing new life for dirty or old materials gives them hope that perhaps they too can be provided a second chance, or at least be respected for their own history and mystery. While we can develop differing philosophies from each of the individuals in Above and Below, they all share an appreciation of the Earth’s soil as the absolute symbol of rebirth.
In a similar vein as Above and Below Ron Fricke’s Samsara constructs a web of associative themes through its visual motifs, sound design, and stunning cinematography. The dozens of locales featured throughout the film are juxtaposed with encounters of ordinary citizens, workers, and families. Rather than fostering a sense of intimacy with some of the many people in the film through dialogue, we are only given momentary close-ups of either their faces or bodies. Otherworldly terrain, beautiful architecture, and busy cities are shown in a lively, moving flow, and are always caught in the rhythmic oscillations of solar light and darkness. Extended time-lapse footage is abandoned for beautiful and raw phenomenological presence when we focus on an individual person, or a group of individuals, who are sometimes positioned in highly pictorial, intentionally plastic arrangements.
This type of aesthetic effect is specific to the portrait, which according to Walter Benjamin is the last refuge of religious value.[9] The gaze is a magnetic force that draws our attention to the singularity of the individual; it is a tense facial display of integrity and an invitation to ruminate on the far away lives of others. The haunting music confers a spiritual energy onto the portraits, and acts as the connective force that links these individuals with the surrounding spaces they might call home. Many of these individuals appear to be refugees, inmates, or grieving lovers, but their stout, ambivalent expressions produce an unnerving intimacy. We do not know who they are or what thoughts inform their gaze. The camera admires the scars, wrinkles, and tattoos on some of their bodies as much as it admires the indelible marks that time has impressed on the terrain. The viewer is given no clear interpretive guide, except the imperative to keep watching.
Samsara’s poetic enterprise reveals a world that is charged with communal streams of life, but also unwavering destruction. The film’s critical bite emerges when it weaves together scenes that express the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism, a system that uses the fetish object as a distraction from the wreckage that lies behind the marketplace. CAFOs, consumerism in bulk, planned obsolescence, foreclosed homes, and factory cities are great affronts to human dignity and also to the planet. A cosmic nonchalance rules current affairs: “Anything goes” has become “everything goes." Samsara’s religio-aesthetic seeks to preserve some sense of the sacred and of the rituals that celebrate what ties us to the world. The goal is to find wisdom beyond knowledge, in the comforts of human communion, and in the feeling of fusion at the heart of the cosmos. The temples, mosques, and natural landscapes featured possess the power to shape those who come within its orbit. All of the individuals featured in the film, however, are impenetrable subjects whose interior lives are inaccessible to us. If Samsara resists typical codes of documentary through allowing its subjects the right not to speak, then it can be said that Agnes Varda in her Gleaners and I does so through implicating herself as a speaking, observing subject to produce a sense of transparency regarding her intentions.
Varda’s film is about the gesture of gleaning, that is, the legalized culling of leftover food after the harvest. She connects the act of picking up and caring for what society deems as “waste” with her role as a filmmaker to reveal the consequences for a society that disrespects waste. For Varda, film is not a transparent window on objective reality, but the material basis of a narrative form that takes shape only with the viewer's participation. The personal video essay often teaches us to recognize our own societal positions.
The act of gleaning, according to Virginia Bonner in her analysis of the film, “defies bourgeois ideologies by challenging class oppression, environment destruction, ageism, and rampant consumerism. The films’ sociocultural critique teaches us to reject our prescribed role under consumer capitalism.”[10] Through comparing the rot of vegetables in fields or detritus in the streets with her own aging body, particularly her hands, Varda playfully constructs ties between how we treat the Earth and how we treat each other’s bodies. Varda’s commitment to revealing the legal understanding of gleaning locates her primacy on preserving a shared legal sense of home. People who do not glean as a lifestyle but as a necessity struggle more to find food when landowners break the law and refuse to allow gleaners on their property even after harvest. This individualistic worldview understands property as a nonhuman extension of the self. It is private property without any obligation to or reciprocal relationship with the community.
Of particular importance is the way in which Varda is able to apply gleaning as a certain type of filmmaking. The access to cheaper video equipment grants her the freedom to film what delights or confounds her. Cheap video cameras in particular are a democratizing tool that allows filmmakers to capture what they consider relevant, without catering to the demands of an audience perpetually fed ideology-affirming images. The Gleaners and I, in particular, embodies a kind of eco-feminist subversion of aesthetics. Bonner writes that instead of affirming the capitalist patriarchy through valuing “the new, the young, the beautiful, the marketable… Varda revalues the used, the aged, even the unsightly.”[11] Because her project does not answer to commercial-driven funders she can reveal the oppressive, financial structures that siphons land to wealthy individuals and keeps hidden a class of people whom society trains us to ignore. It is the access to more affordable equipment that excites Varda. Artists and thinkers can work outside of the industry and use film to speculate ideas aloud, probe into the complexities of daily existence, and form a new sensory fabric.
Above and Below, Samsara, and Gleaners and I each present innovative ways to make real and undeniable this imminent threat of homelessness, a world in which we are all estranged from each other, and where we lack the implicate mutuality that constitutes the sense of belonging and care. Bill Nichols’ in his critical essay “The Political Documentary and the Question of Impact” ruminates how we ought to value films that attempt to spur social change. He hesitantly admits that funding sources too often dictate the metrics for social impact. Web site clicks, tweets, Facebook “likes,” and donations allow us to change the world without going through all the trouble of actually standing up. Nichols rightfully asks: “If maximum social impact is to bring about needed legislation, why not spend money on lobbyists rather than films?”[12] It is here that I would like to turn to BCCTV, the video arts collective I am a member of in Portland, Oregon. Projects like BCCTV seek to place the conversation of social change on the side of production, rather than place it strictly in terms of audience engagement or participation. The writings of philosopher Henri Lefebvre can help us look beyond gauging social impact through an exclusively legal framework, thereby curtailing Nichols’ concern that legislation is too often regarded as the indicator of a film’s ability to successfully change society.
In 2013 I became one of the coordinators of Bud Clark Commons Television, or BCCTV. For the past four years, BCCTV has held regular meetings and an annual workshop series in and around Bud Clark Commons, a service hub for those who experience houselessness. The building, which is located in the Old Town neighborhood in Portland, is named after Bud Clark, the mayor of Portland who held office from 1985 to 1992, and whose policies directed at confronting houselessness have largely remained today.
BCCTV has sustained itself through various grants, with the first coming from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, or RACC, and most recently through the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Precipice Fund, and the Calligram Foundation. Throughout the years we have been able to expand our equipment inventory from a few handheld HD video cameras to include a GoPro and three HD broadcast cameras, along with some tripods and zoom recorders. We are fortunately able to work closely with the Pacific Northwest College of Art, just across the street from Bud Clark Commons, to use their green room and sound studio. Other filmmaking programs in the city that work with the houseless, like Project Viewfinder based out of the Northwest Film Center, require its participants to become subjects of their own films. They center their films on houselessness and use their participants as intimate entry points to capture the difficult daily existence of living on the streets or in temporary housing. While the participants receive an inside look into the filmmaking process, this model contains a problematic position of dominance. These organizations claim the authority to “Let them speak.” The philosophy of BCCTV is to be an inviting, accessible space that allows people to play with the medium of film in whatever way they choose. One’s housing status does not define any one’s identity, and the issue of houselessness does not need to define the content of any of our projects.
The aim of BCCTV is to turn video production into an avenue for different classes of people to collaborate. Deconstructing hierarchical levels of access to filmmaking draws on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the Right to the City.[13] In his 1968 book Lefebvre re-envisions a city in which users manage urban space for themselves, beyond the control of both the state and capitalism.[14] Political action is defined not in terms of legal strategies but in terms of a radical struggle to apprehend human life as a complex whole, transcending identifying markers such as class status, gender, race, income, consumer habits, marital status, and so on. As a conceptual tool to understand today’s neoliberal urban policies Lefebvre’s writings have organized resistance and social movements in multiple forms, from Arjun Appadurai’s “Right to Research” to Right to the City Alliance’s response to gentrification. CLICK BCCTV positions creative practices as a means to ensure that filmmaking belongs to all of us and not only to some. The space of BCCTV transgresses the class division that marks the houseless inhabitants of the Old Town neighborhood. Artistic collaboration thus creates an opening to reject cold, technocratic top-down planning.
The films discussed throughout this paper call for an expansive definition of home in order to combat the bankrupt values that promote inequality. Artistic playgrounds like BCCTV imagine how production instead of representation can be employed as a means to critique oppressive neoliberal imaginings on both the local and the global sphere. The vulnerable, elusive presence of life on screen is considered secondary to the actual face-to-face encounters between artists who share a desire to produce rather than consume images. Liberating political and social gestures found in the process of film production not only affirms a kind of Right to the City but also rejects the hegemonic practices of an industry that privileges financial wealth over ethical conduct. Discussing the aesthetics of poverty should thus direct us to the realm of cell phone activism, guerilla documentaries akin to Marc Singer’s Dark Days, and collaborative spaces like BCCTV. Forging alternative futures together and with everyone in mind through filmmaking can act as a spiritual rejoinder to the impoverishment produced by neoliberalism, and preserve a non-economic definition of wealth in the form of community building.
WORKS CITED
[1]. Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 154.
[2]. Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 52.
[3]. Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 8.
[4]. Jean Baudrillard, America (New York: Verso 2010).
[5]. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Beaurocracy, (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015), 52.
[6]. Julia Hell and George Steinmetz, “Ruinopolis: Post-Imperial Theory and Learning from Las Vegas,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 3 (2014): 1057.
[7]. Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 3.
[8]. Peter Sloterdijk, Globes: Spheres Volume II: Macroshperology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agent, 2014).
[9]. Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso Books, 2011), 108.
[10]. Virginia Bonner, “The Gleaners and ‘Us’: The Radical Modesty of Agnès Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse” in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 499.
[11]. Virginia Bonner, “The Gleaners and ‘Us’: The Radical Modesty of Agnès Varda’s Les glaneurs et la glaneuse,” 497.
[12]. Bill Nichols, Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary (Oakland, CA: University of Oakland Press, 2016), 225.
[13]. Mark Purcell, “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City” in Journal of Urban Affairs 35, no.1 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2013) 141-154.
[14]. Henri Lefebvre, Writing on Cities, trans. and ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996).
