About the Film

Single Stream takes a close look at the problem of waste through a visual and sonic exploration of a materials-recovery facility in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Its title refers to the recycling system in which glass, metal, paper, and plastic are collected together and separated later inside a specialized plant.

Within the cavernous building, conveyor belts, sorting mechanisms, compressed air, machinery, and human workers form an immense system that operates with remarkable coordination. Materials are carried, separated, crushed, shredded, and compressed in a continuous process that resembles both a disassembly line and an industrial digestive tract.

Blurring observation and abstraction, the film moves between recognizable objects and fields of color, texture, motion, and sound. Slightly slowed images and Ernst Karel’s dense sonic composition give the movement of waste a mesmeric quality, making familiar consumer objects appear strange after they have been used, discarded, and reduced to their material composition.

The film makes visible a process that ordinarily remains outside public view. By confronting viewers with the scale and persistence of what society discards, Single Stream becomes a meditation on material transformation, impermanence, and the consequences of a culture of excess.

Watch the Film

Available for educational and institutional exhibition through Cinema Guild.

Cinema Guild

Single Stream is available to stream on DAFilms.

Watch on DAFilms

Interview and Writing

The Brooklyn Rail conversation with Chi-hui Yang
A substantial discussion of the work’s origins, panoramic form, material transformation, consumer culture, impermanence, abstraction, and the relation between image and spatialized sound.

Genevieve Yue, “Festivals: Ann Arbor,” Film Comment
A critical account of the cinema version, emphasizing the film’s approach to abstraction, its slowed movement, industrial soundscape, and the transformed status of familiar consumer objects as waste.