Movie: Manufactured Landscapes
Summary: MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste.
In the spirit of such environmentally enlightening sleeper-hits as AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH and RIVERS AND TIDES, MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES powerfully shifts our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it, without simplistic judgments or reductive resolutions.
My thoughts: Edward Burtynsky had a goal with this video, with the images that drove him, and he achieved it beautifully. A couple words kept going through my mind as I watched this video – scale and order. To see a former mountain inverted and turned into perfect cut out circles, to see a quarry with its perfect squares being cut into the earth…it is disorienting, and seeing it is very different from reading about it.
One of the aspects of this film that I found absolutely compelling was the very thing that I have heard others complain about – the narration of the film explains what you are looking at and how it got to that point, but he does not tell you how to judge what you are seeing. Edward shows the scale, the side effects, the human factor in what is otherwise unimaginable. It is up to us to decide whether we think it is good, bad, or indifferent.
The images are visually compelling, even when they are chilling. He doesn’t look for the ugly in these landscapes, he finds the beauty in them. The result is thought-provoking, and has in my opinion a greater impact than if he’d shown the ugly horror of the environmental destruction. Imagine, after all, a “river of rust,” as he calls it, the red streaking through gently rolling black hills. Visually, it is beautiful. And that makes the horror of what it is have that much greater impact. This is his power, and the power of the entire movie.
Well worth watching, for both the information as well as the visual artistry of Edward Burtynsky’s images.
