For much of the film’s second half, Martens trains local photographers to make pictures of poverty, of ‘raped women, corpses and malnourished children’ (this last, viewers watch them photograph), an export hypothetically more valuable than coffee, palm oil and coltan combined. Roughly halfway through the film, it is indicated to Martens that between 70–90 percent flows back to some countries by allegedly selective investment in situations from which donors can directly benefit. Around one quarter of this money is, viewers learn, recycled back into the aid industry by being spent on ‘technical assistance’, a euphemism for consultancy. A little later, he poses a question at a World Bank meeting, asking if poverty is worth $1.8 billion annually, whether it can be considered DRC’s primary resource and thus treated as such. Soon after, at an exhibition of plantation photography showing romanticised, black and white images of workers, he asks buyers whether they think the mise-en-scène subjects are rich or poor. For example, he parodies moralising mottos – they must help themselves, we can’t give them what they don’t already have – whilst others carry his heavy camera equipment and boxes containing a florescent sign, which when erected reads ‘Enjoy Poverty, please’. Over the course of ninety minutes, Martens goes on to demonstrate, participate in and bluntly outline the inequalities and relentless exploitation experienced in DRC. His response is apparently satisfactory, or at least sufficient to deter further questions.įilm still from Enjoy Poverty, Renzo Martens, © Renzo Martens 2008 A figure in uniform asks who Martens is – ‘I’m a journalist’, he answers. Understandably perplexed, the fishermen are slow to respond: ‘This is what we do’. When they land, he is disparaging about their small catch, suggesting they should fish for something else. Finally, Martens is on a small fishing boat with three other men. The camera is simultaneously a tool and imposition of distance. Next, the camera is in an urban market where charity workers hand out parcels to locals whilst enthusiastically taking photographs a notably pale youth in a charity t-shirt beams as he does so. Exasperatedly, he complains of the cyclical nature and the amount of work compared to the money earned: ‘It takes three days to make half a dollar’. A plantation labourer maintains the overgrowth with a machete in central DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo).
Three short opening sequences succinctly frame the work’s interlinked subjects. Renzo Martens’ essay-film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008) deals – to some crucially, and to others controversially – with the economisation of abject human deprivation and its parallel image industry.
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