Dust by Hartmut Bitomsky

Grime, filth, soot, earth, soil, powder, dirt. Dust comes in many forms. It can be small, big, light, yellow, white, grey, orange, wet, sticky, heavy, fluffy, clustered, toxic. It’s present in clouds, houses, machines, vacuum cleaners, art, stars and our bodies. You could say everything starts as dust, or becomes it, eventually.

Humans have an ambiguous relationship with dust. This relationship is considered in Staub, from the first connotation most people have with it, the stuff lying around the house, up to the birth of stars : from the ordinary to the very origins of life. One woman is obsessed with the dust invading her personal space. She spends most of her time trying to fight it and after having cleaned every corner she can think of, even inside her TV, she starts all over again. A man who assembles vacuum cleaners says : “We have to get rid of dust, that’s decisive”. Not everybody seems so hostile. A young artist is obsessed with dust, sees them as little pieces of art, collects them, reforms them and sticks them onto a canvas. Scientists discover that certain forms of dust getting into our blood system can cause death, and cleaners try to get rid of every last particle in a microchip laboratory, but turn out to be the main contaminators themselves.

Bitomsky tries to open our eyes to a world we don’t really consider our own. Dust simply exists ; it’s an alien matter without a clear source. It turns out that some reddish sand left by the rain on your windscreen is actually from the Sahara. But is sand also dust ? And pieces of uranium from the impact of a bombshell, is that dust ? The exact definition does not become clear and the film seems to be dealing more with particles in general. It’s not the most exciting and fast-paced movie you’ll ever see, the interviews sometimes resemble a home shopping channel demonstration in which they take you by the hand through every single step of a very complicated scientific process. The rhythm of the movie is somehow too slow for the nicely composed images, accompanied by a monotonous voice-over.

Still, the movie touches on some interesting existential questions. What do we really understand about the physicality of our own bodies ? Do we consider ourselves to be outside the physical world ? Where does matter come from ? Where do we come from ?

You will never look at clouds in the same way.

Maartje Alders