Edward Burtynsky's Manufactured Landscapes

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES
by Jennifer Baichwal

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is a feature length documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky makes large-scale photographs of ‘manufactured landscapes’ – quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams. He photographs civilization’s materials and debris, but in a way people describe as “stunning” or “beautiful,” and so raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics without trying to easily answer them.

The film follows Burtynsky to China as he travels the country photographing the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. Sites such as the Three Gorges Dam, which is bigger by 50% than any other dam in the world and displaced over a million people, factory floors over a kilometre long, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai’s urban renewal are subjects for his lens and our motion picture camera.

Shot in Super-16mm film, Manufactured Landscapes extends the narrative streams of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our profound impact on the planet and witness both the epicentres of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste. What makes the photographs so powerful is his refusal in them to be didactic. We are all implicated here, they tell us: there are no easy answers. The film continues this approach of presenting complexity, without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions. In the process, it tries to shift our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it.

2006, Canada, 90 mins.

Watch Documentary HERE

Source: 

http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/Sections/The_Film/Manufactured_Landscapes.html

Architectural Dystopian Projections in the films Metropolis , Brazil, and The Island

Written by Angeliki Avgitidou.

In the proposals which describe utopian constructions envisioned by philosophers, utopian socialists and writers alike, the uniformity of the needs, assertions and believes of each utopia’s members is considered as a given. Uniformity takes away personal expression, multiplicity and difference, essential elements of life as well as of creative expression(1), granting priority to the interests of the majority in the name of equality and justice. The determinism of this assertion as well as its inevitable bankruptcy has served as a starting point for the majority of dystopian films. Fiction films, such as Metropolis , Brazil  and The Island , are commented below in relation to the architectural environments represented

in them, the ideological basis of their choices and the timeliness of the dystopian visions which they put forward. 

According to Maria Luise Bernieri: “Utopians tend to forget that society is a living organism and that its organization must be an expression of life and not just a dead structure”(2) . The paternalistic monomania of utopian visions becomes a leitmotiv in fiction films describing dystopia, which demand that their members show flexibility and adaptability to an established social structure and a political organization.