You’d probably be hard pressed to argue that world renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky hasn’t tapped something extraordinary with his work. “Nature transformed through industry”: this is what the Toronto based artist aims to capture in each of his brilliant photographs, images of things such as mile long industrial assembly lines and brilliantly colored recycling yards, phenomena so easily overlooked until they are viewed through his lense. His collections have traveled the globe just as well as they have documented its changing face. So his work makes prime fodder for director Jennifer Baichwal, who was undoubtedly looking to extend the exploration into the meaning of photographic art she began with The True Meaning of Pictures (2002). Manufactured Landscapes is Baichwal’s attempt to expand the meaning and the impact of Burtynsky’s work by fleshing it out with film. But she does too little here; those seeking the beautiful irony in Burtynsky’s work are probably better off seeing his exhibit.
The film begins with a five minute sweeping shot of a Chinese industrial assembly line which is about five minutes too long. This particular scene is a shining example of how Manufactured Landscapes tries too hard to overwhelm and ends up floundering with the opposite effect. It’s a delicate endeavor, to make art about art, because good art tends to speak for itself. Burtynsky’s is good art, which is good for his exhibits but bad for this film. The suggestions of his photographs and the imagination needed to comprehend them are what make his work so fantastic. Baichwal’s film does all this work for the viewer, and takes way too long to do it.
There’s a lot more going on in Manufactured Landscapes than art appreciation and a global understating of our world’s industrial age. I felt a more than subtle critique of communism pervading this movie. Both the photographs and supplementary footage are taken from China, a nation that’s chasing the tail of industry and desperate to make up for lost time. A lot of the movie’s landscape consists of Chinese factory workers, clad in yellow uniforms with checkered collars emblematic of an ongoing race. The interviewees extracted out of these ‘extraction landscapes’ to talk about their lives were all too choice: a manufacturing rep who couldn’t speak about the delights of her business without prewritten notes and a young woman who started working in a massive shipyard after she ‘failed’ to enter high school are just a few examples. Is this film about art? Or politics?
Burtynsky himself narrated Manufactured Landscapes, but I wish the movie would have coughed up some of his own biography along with that of his subjects. He did comment on the motivation behind his work, particularly his desire to keep it free from politics. I don’t think he did a very good job.
I’m not entirely negative here. Often it takes a movie to introduce an issue, an event, an artist, and perhaps a lot of people will probe some really fantastic artwork as a result of Manufactured Landscapes. The images are quite fascinating, multilayered, and supremely meaningful, but their assembly made Manufactured Landscapes more of a slideshow and less of a movie. Maybe I am just another mindless consumer, but ultimately, Landscapes bored me.
Liz Licorish
Comments Directed To: LizFlix@gmail.com
Published July 6, 2007
