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This week I was able to attend the screening of the short film (Figure A) “This Mortal Plastik” by Jess Irish. It was a short nonfiction “film which dives into the world’s most impersonal substance: plastics”¹

(Figure B)

Figure A: Zoom confirmation screenshot

Irish uses today's infatuation with media and film to frame her work on environmental justice. Specifically in “This Mortal Plastik” Irish is hounding down on single use plastics, and analyzes their necessity in our everyday society. She used artistic representations of plastics matched with sounds to target the senses. At one point in her film the narration called single use plastics as synthetic skins, which really stood out to me. The idea that we need a barrier between us and the products we use is just an idea that has been pounded in by the thought of normalcy. She highlighted three questions about these synthetic skins, are they useful? Are they necessary? And are they required? After she asked these key questions she had me really questioning the very reason we use single use plastics. It seems to me that we don’t really need to be covering everything we buy in an extra skin, most of what we cover has its own skin and gets washed. I appreciated the research that went into creating her film, Pictured below(Figure C) is a screen shot that I took during the screening that shows a truck of single use plastics. She specifically talked about the celebration of “throw away living” which also created an emotional reaction from me. She illustrated this way of life with the thousands of tons of trash that is thrown “away” daily. 

Figure B: Cover of short film "This Mortal Plastik"

Figure C: Screenshot of Zoom Meeting

Citations: 

Works Cited: 

1 2021. “This Mortal Plastik.” Jess Irish, 1 Jan. 1970, http://jessirish.com/this-mortal-plastik/. 

Image Citations: 

1 Event Confirmation, Hanna Wittmack, 2022

2 Front Cover of short film, Jess Irish, 2022

3 Screenshot of zoom, Hanna Wittmack, 2022