The Wasteland

“Tilling my own grave to keep me level.”

~Maynard James Keenan

The Wasteland

By Freddy Funbuns

Kiyotaka Tsurisaki’s pursuit on the heels of death has taken him around the world.  In his documentary Orozco the Embalmer, Tsurisaki captured the sardonic Froilan Orozco in the bowls of a Columbian ghetto where he had been working as a mortician for more than 40 years.  In his death film collection titled Junk Films, Tsurisaki presents a vivid canvas of cultures around the world addressing their own mortality.  The Wasteland, recently released stateside by Massacre Video, has a similar approach to Junk Films by editing together footage shot all over the world, but setting the film the music of Japanese metal band Corrupted.  The outcome of The Wasteland is a powerful vision of humanity that is grim and violent but also beautiful and vulnerable.  

The Wasteland started off slow comparatively to Tsurisaki’s previous two films.  The film starts with shaky, low-fi video footage around a small indigenous town showing kids playing and fog rolling across the surrounding hills.  Once the music starts making itself known and the locations start changing The Wasteland takes on a life of its own.  The film ebbs and flows to the music of Corrupted, from slow dirge soundscapes to grinding riffs that churn your bowels as harshly as botulism tainted rat meat burritos from Chipotle.  The Wasteland’s theme appears to be how far from innocence we can get; beginning with children playing in a small underdeveloped village then transitioning to large scale military drills, self mutilations during the Vegetarian Festival in Thailand, and various depictions of death and dying from all over the world.  Footage from the aftermath of the tsunami in Thailand seems to be the equalizer in the film, showing no matter how strong we appear to be the planet can teach us a lesson about how weak and powerless we are from time to time.    

I loved The Wasteland and feel it’s a stronger film than Tsurisaki’s Junk Films.  It does start slow, and there is absolutely no narrative or dialogue, Tsurisaki lets the film segments and music speak for themselves and if you have this playing in the background while drilling lines of Adderall to stay up all night and write your music history thesis on the importance of the 7 String Nu Metal revolution of the mid to late 90’s, you might miss the entire message of The Wasteland.