« Bears Gone Wild | Main | Toxic Frequent Flyer »

Manufactured Landscapes

Wed., July 11, 2007

The documentary Manufactured Landscapes makes more of an overt political and environmental statement than Edward Burtynsky’s mammoth manmade panoramas, the results of what he calls “the pursuit of progress”: heaps of waste or recyclable materials; earth scarred from the extraction of copper, nickel and iron ore; literal mountains of coal, photographed from such a distance they resemble densely forested hills.

With a nudge of focus, Burtynsky’s subjects could be Sebastião Salgado’s men bent by the labor of imposing environments. But his most recognized shots don’t feature people at all and if they’re there, they’re included only as yardsticks of scale, dwarfed by their surroundings.

Director Jennifer Baichwal reveals these details only implied by Burtynsky, the creators and tenants of these landscapes, which turns the film into more of An Inconvenient Truth than a documentary on Burtynsky, which is what I’d been hoping for, though the details are engrossing and disturbing. Something approaching half of all computers disposed in bulk (charmingly termed “e-waste”) end up in Asia, where they’re harvested for valuable metals in the circuit boards. In a snip of voiceover from a lecture given by Burtynsky, he notes some villages where this recycling takes place have become so toxic with lead and heavy metals that the water is no longer safe to drink and must be constantly trucked in.

The documentary also highlights China’s manufacturing sector, showing madly repetitive work. A woman assembles a circuit breaker by hand in about a minute: she can crank out 400 per shift, she says proudly, and she’s been at it for six years.

Some of the most intriguing images come from the construction of the Three Gorges Dam project, which Burtynsky was invited by the Chinese government to document earlier this decade. It’s startling that many of the more than one million people displaced by this project have been responsible for demolishing their own cities.

“It’s a very broad view,” says a Chinese man, viewing a Polaroid Burtynsky has taken of him waking through the dam project with a bundle of sticks on his back. “It’s hard to see the details.”

Tags: Movie | Comments have been closed.