In the lead up to the 7th Canadian Film Festival in Australia (August 2012), join us as we countdown the Top 100 Canadian Films of the past 30 years. We'll be posting one film a day leading up to Canada Day on July 1st 2012. Do you agree with our team favourites? Let us know your thoughts!
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has spent almost three decades capturing the impact that humanity has upon its environment, from photographing mines and quarries to huge industrial factories and e-waste dumps.
His aim, as he explains at a TED talk in Manufactured Landscapes, is to document, “the landscape of our time – the one that we change through ‘progress’ – as a way of defining who we are and how we relate to the planet,” not to glorify the achievements of capitalist industry, nor to damn its impact upon the environment, but simply to show us: this is what it is.
The photographs themselves are stunning and often quite beautiful – people and even huge machines are dwarfed within the apocalyptic landscapes of industrial mines and oil drenched beaches. Yet Jennifer Baichwal's documentary Manufactured Landscapes goes a step further, following Burtynsky on his photography expeditions and capturing the human impact of such a globalised industry, as well as the environmental cost.
From the opening sequence – a six minute long continuous dolly shot of an inconceivably large factory floor in China, rolling past the thousands of yellow-shirted workers bent to their repetitive work - you get a taste of the immensity of the industrial production processes that are about to be documented.
Interweaving scenes of Burtynsky’s TED talk (the only exposition in the documentary, besides un-subtitled vox pops from Chinese factory workers) and gallery displays of his work with behind-the-scenes footage of Burtynsky at work around the world, Manufactured Landscapes provides both a compelling look inside the photographer’s work process, as well as a disheartening look at the human and natural consequences of our consumer comforts, from mobile phones to electrical wall switches.
Just a 30 second close-up of Chinese factory workers performing finicky, repetitive tasks is enough to drive you insane – imagining having to perform such tasks for 12 hours a day, forever, is enough to make you pray for a lobotomy.
But the factory workers are still better off than the Chinese villagers who recycle e-waste like computer motherboards, heating up the plastic to extract the heavy metals like cadmium and barium, which then leak into the ground and poison the soil and water supply.
And even those folk living amongst a sea of first world trash are better off than the shipbreakers at Chittagong Beach in Bangladesh, where most of the world’s shipping tankers go to die and be broken down into pieces by hand by local workers, who wade through a literal ocean of oil to do their work, and rarely live beyond 30.
All rather depressing, really, but Manufactured Landscapes isn’t here to judge – it simply presents these images and lets you draw your own conclusions. We’re all accessories to the worst sins of globalised industry just by existing and consuming in first world countries. Much like the way that supermarket meat is divorced from the process of death and butchery, we rarely have to face up to where our goods come from. It doesn’t mean you have to live off the grid, but it’s always good to appreciate just how much something costs.
- Nick Jarvis
“Manufactured Landscapes makes an inelegant point elegantly: Humanity is altering the landscape drastically and by implication irrevocably.” Stephen Hunter - Washington Post
To see the other films in the countdown so far, click here.