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
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