Photographer Edward Burtynsky carved out a niche for himself in landscape photography, by focusing on carved-out landscapes: Quarries, mines, junkyards, superhighways, factories and pretty much anywhere human incursion had transformed the earth into a new arrangement.
Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary looks at the same manufactured landscapes as Burtynsky, and looks at Burtynsky while he looks at them, using plenty of examples of his photographs, some narration from Burtynsky, and, in the opening, a rather stunning example of Burtynsky posing and taking a photo, which melds into the photo itself (that’s it at the top of the post), which then melds into people looking at the photo.
Burtynsky’s work may be static–particularly before it’s blown up to gallery display size, or, for our purposes here, to fill the frame of the film–but it’s also extremely challenging, as he looks for and so often finds the beauty in what may of us instinctively realize are ugly things, the degradation of the natural world for benefit of modern society. In Burtynsky’s work, beauty often seems to take the side of industry and commerce over the environment and nature, forcing one to think about the powerful effects of industrialization, without telling one what to think.
Baichwal adds some more ugly–and equally challenging–thoughts into the mix, following the photographer to China and Bangladesh, to explore the sad, cyclical nature of industrialization. We tear up the earth in the west to get metals, which we send to China for their laborers to assemble into things, which they send back to us to use and, once they’re all used up and ready to be discarded, we send them back to China, where they’re stripped of the metal components.
For all the questions asked, the film doesn’t provide much in the way of answers, or give a lot of background on the questions themselves (If there’s a lesson being taught here, it’s open-ended and Socratic). Much of it consists simply of beautiful images floating by (Interestingly, the industrial settings of China and Asia lack the washed-out, gritty look we in the Midwest, who have crossed back and forth over the rust belt over the years, tend to associate with the word “industrial;” China’s factories and shipping areas are candy bright, and clean and new, as if they themselves just rolled out of a factory).
The film plays more like a gallery show than a movie, but at least it’s a gallery show full of unquestionably beautiful work.
Manufactured Landscapes screens Friday and Saturday, June 8 and 9, at 7 p.m. in the Wexner Center for the Art’s Film/Video Theater. The program also includes Moment Musical, a reconstruction of a short 1933 experimental Polish film. For more info, click to wexarts.org.