Wasteland No. 2: Hardy, Hearty (Jodie Mack, 2019)

One of the true pleasures of being a film critic is when you are in the midst of a truly great artist who is in their creative prime. It doesn't happen as much as it should, but when it does it is an affirming thing to know that the medium is in good hands, and that we aren't all wasting our time on a hopeless pursuit. I doubt I am alone in feeling that Jodie Mack is a filmmaker currently operating at the height of her powers, and we are all pretty fortunate to be around to enjoy the fruits of her labor.

Even a film such as Wasteland No. 2, which seems to have been conceived as a relatively minor work, is executed with such compositional skill and innate sense of color that it stands far above the efforts of other filmmakers who are throwing far more ideas at the wall in hopes of producing definitive, landmark opuses. As with Wasteland No. 1, the new film is both a flicker film and a naturalists' inventory, a consideration of organic material stripped of its native context and placed under the cine-microscope for an isolated, although not necessarily clinical examination.

The alternating images consist of groups of flowers frozen in ice cubes, seemingly thrown onto a table top at random, and a series of individual shots of root systems from single plants. In both instances, Mack is showing us disrupted life, plants uprooted and removed from the garden for some unclear human purpose. Are the flowers in ice being killed or preserved? Are they specimens from some experiment, or are the merely decorative gewgaws for a punchbowl at some springtime fête? And what of the roots? Are these plants appearing before us on the way to being planted, or after having been violently yanked from their beds?

Wasteland No. 2: Hardy, Hearty suggests that we are seeing fragile living things in a moment of suspension. These plants are rugged and can take the disruption, but only for so long. We are not privy to what happens to them next, so we must content ourselves with the knowledge that even though they hover in a liminal state between life and death, they cannot feel any pain. We, of course, are not so lucky.