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Explore the world in macrovision
Director makes ‘ugly’ look lovely
By Melissa Campbell
We follow Burtynsky across China and to oilrigs and shipyards in Bangladesh before settling in Shanghai, a living dichotomy of tradition and modernity.
“Manufactured Landscapes” is a visual masterpiece. I do not say that lightly. Director Jennifer Baichwal and cinematographer Peter Mettler produced a film that is as magnificent as the grand and often panoramic photographs of Edward Burtynsky, the subject of the film.
Burtynsky, as the film addresses, is not your average photographer. “Manufactured Landscapes” explores his interest in industrialism, more specifically in the people who make it happen, and its by-products.
The film opens with a crawling tracking shot inside an enormous Chinese factory that lasts a never-ending eight minutes. It becomes quite difficult to watch at a certain point, but impossible to turn away from.
There are rows and rows of factory workers, busy with tedious and repetitive tasks. It’s a puzzling opening because it is given no context (we learn later that it is the subject of a photograph by Burtynsky).
As the shot comes to an end, we are introduced to Burtynksy’s voice; we don’t know that it is Burtynsky for sure, but it can be inferred.
We follow Burtynsky across China and to oilrigs and shipyards in Bangladesh before settling in Shanghai, a living dichotomy of tradition and modernity. Along the way, we see tire dumps and electronic wastelands. We watch a woman in the same factory from the opening scene, who has been putting together countless amounts of these electronic devices for the past six years.
Burtynsky tells us that he is so interested in Chinese industry because most of the materials used in the factories, like aluminum and plastic, are not native to China and must be shipped in; only to be formed into products that are shipped right back out again.
Baichwal and Mettler like to alternate between following Burtynsky on his photographic endeavors across Asia, and with a montage of Burtynsky’s photographs. These work fine, as they are beautiful images, but their most successful use of his photos is when they start very tight on a person in a photograph, and then zoom out to show the environment.
This works so well because so many of Burtynsky’s images illustrate humans as being very small when compared to the magnitude of industry behind them. The use of the zoom out is extremely effective; it illustrates the macroscopic nature of his photographs.
The subject matter of Burtynsky's film is handled extremely well. Baichwal addresses perfectly a disparity between what Burtynsky is trying to capture with his camera and how his photographs are perceived. A horror exists in viewing, through Mettler’s camera, young boys working in shipyards, covered from head to toe in oil. Yet in his photographs, there is a magnificent beauty that overtakes the viewer. At the same time, there is a questioning of how he makes the “ugly” look so lovely.
The takeover of pristine environment by garbage, decay and sludge leaves the viewer feeling simultaneously awed by what they have just seen and terribly depressed about the state of our planet. This is that disparity that Baichwal consciously chooses not to resolve, so that the viewer can wrestle with it long after the last image leaves the screen.
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