ENJOY POVERTY - De Filmfreak

Over de film
“Compassion obstructs us from realising that we are a constituting part of the world being represented” - Susan Sontag
Episode III ‘Enjoy Poverty’ is the conclusion of a trilogy of documentaries in which the 33-year-old
Dutch filmmaker Renzo Martens questions and investigates the role of his own position as a filmmaker.
In this film he investigates the emotional and economic value of Africa’s most lucrative and fastest
growing export product: filmed and photographed poverty.
However shocking the countless documentaries and pictures we see of such phenomena in Africa, these
films never reveal their own position : the export of filmed poverty and the poverty alleviation industry
that is justified by it, is far more lucrative than any of the traditional exports will ever be, while it offers
the poor – the caterers of the raw material - just as little in return.
It seems a methodological stalemate: One can only denounce poverty by depicting it. Yet these depictions
incorporate suffering into an economy from which no poor person benefits. Images of poverty are not
just a window to the world but rather a portal to capital interests. Are the underprivileged not owners of
their own images of deprivation? Why are Westerners the only ones with the right to use these images?
Even the most critical filmmakers seem unable to invent anything but depicting poverty over and over
again. This film, therefore, will not depict, but be.
Episode III ‘Enjoy Poverty’ shows how countless development projects encourage the underprivileged to
breed rabbits or cycle bananas to the market, while TV-crews stand ready to underline the need for the
project in question. There exists no project that explains that the filming of bananas brings in a lot more
money than growing them. While the poverty alleviation industry with its monthly income, per diems,
jeeps, private jets and mansions with golf courses, enjoys a multi-billion dollar yearly turn-over, the poor
are urged to scrape by a living with bananas and rabbits.
Renzo Martens utilizes a radical artistic approach to make a film about the complex dynamics between the
underprivileged and the media depicting them. His undertaking falls within the tradition of performance
artists from the 1960s, where the protagonist is engaged physically on his own. It is a one-man action of
someone who measures himself against the world around him. This film is therefore Romantic in a
Nietzsche-like manner.
The originality lies in the way in which Renzo uses his own presence as filmmaker in order to determine
the role he could play upon the conditions around him. By filming the world and himself the spectator
witnesses the exchange between the director and the occurring realities. Through the course of the film he
is adopting a series of common roles or attitudes of outsiders who have been active in Africa (ie. the
explorer, the journalist, the filmmaker, the development worker, the priest, etc...).
During the filming period, Renzo Martens launches an emancipatory process that would ensure that the
Africans control their own fate. With a range of emancipatory tools, including a neon advertisement
saying 'Please, enjoy poverty' set up in the Congolese jungle, Renzo enlightens the poor to the fact their
poverty brings in more foreign currency than any other export product, so that they can understand its
economic value and they themselves can pick its fruits. In Episode III ‘Enjoy Poverty’ the poor are not
given a fish, but a fishing rod.
Still Renzo is unable to offer lasting solutions. In places where no filmmaker, journalist or NGO finds it
necessary to come, poverty has no economic value. After having searched for alternatives, Renzo urges the
poor to simply accept poverty, not for them to make a fortune out of it, but because there is simply no
alternative. As it often happens, the crowd then turns against the forces that strive to emancipate them.
The result is a film that allows the audience to assess its relation to some of the world’s phenomena,
hithertho obscured by depictions of it. Episode III ‘Enjoy Poverty’ is a burningly relevant and revealing
film about the viewers relationship to poverty.