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Manufactured Landscapes movie review |
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Written by Colin Covert, MCT
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Tuesday, 14 August 2007 |
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MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES
3 stars
Documentary directed by Jennifer Baichwal
Unrated; suitable for all audiences. In English and subtitled Mandarin and Bangla.
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How's this for a cognitive loop? Industrial sprawl converts natural landscapes to wasteland. Canadian fine art photographer Edward Burtynsky shoots the recycling dumps, superfactories, vast quarries and shipyards, capturing visual beauty in the ecological devastation.
"Manufactured Landscapes," a documentary about Burtynsky's photography, finds beauty in ugliness, creation in destruction, art in commerce and politics in aesthetics. The images are so beautifully colored and composed you have to work to remember you're looking at something ugly.
Director Jennifer Baichwal begins her film inside a vast Chinese factory, camera dollying right to left past identical rows of assembly stations in an unbroken eight-minute take, the camera move echoing the overwhelming scale of Burtynsky's large-scale photos. Every few rows we see a parrot-green supervisor's desk. Indistinguishable rows of workers in color-coded smocks alternate with lookalike green desks minute upon minute until a hypnotic sense of deja vu takes hold.
Reading statistics about China's unprecedented industrial expansion is informative, but seeing it through an unblinking camera lens makes the overwhelming magnitude of things real.
There's not much narration in this taciturn film, and not much needed. Images of garbage mountains and steam irons on conveyor belts in a mechanized ballet don't demand a lot of clarification. But there are moments when I wanted more information about what I was seeing. The film weaves together images that are identified as China and Bangladesh with unnamed others that I gather come from Italy, the United States, Canada and elsewhere, which creates a confusion of context.
Burtynsky himself is careful not to offer political pronouncements about his work, nor to scold China for modernization that has lifted the living standards of millions. He merely notes the costs alongside the benefits. He tells the story of a Chinese recycling city where computer parts are scavenged for valuable components. Heavy metal pollution poisoned the water table so dangerously that the population lives on bottled water.
"I think a lot of people today sit in that uncomfortable spot where we don't want to give up what we've got, but we realize that what we're doing is creating problems that run deep," he observes.
"Manufactured Landscapes" avoids zonked-out "Koyaanisqatsi"-style trippiness with regular cutaways to the locals. We meet workers on China's massive Three Gorges Dam project and see photos of 13 large cities that were dismantled brick by brick to make way for the floodwaters. The film creates some predictable contrasts in scenes of a prosperous Shanghai Realtor showing her palatial home and a degraded old woman displaced by the city's explosive urban renewal.
The interviews and monologues aren't especially probing, but they don't need to be. The conversations are small talk, but the images are eloquent.
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