PLOT: A film crew follows the footsteps of acclaimed photographer Edward Burtynsky through China and Bangladesh, recapturing the images of man's often-toxic reshaping of nature (factories, ship-breaking beaches, the Three Gorges Dam) that was the theme of a recent, successful gallery show.
The opening scene in Manufactured Landscapes -- the doc version of photographer Edward Burtynsky's acclaimed "China exhibit" -- is one of the most memorable I've seen in years.
It's a slow pan, several minutes long, courtesy of cinematographer and film festival darling Peter Mettler (Gambling, Gods & LSD), a filmmaker with a penchant for languid.
The subject: A Chinese factory, apparently several football fields in area, every square foot of it bustling with $3-a-day workers, each devoted to their incomprehensible busy-work. With every few feet, we absorb more of the factory's numbing scale, while being clueless about what it's actually producing.
That, in a nutshell, is Burtynsky's theme -- the prologue and aftermath of the "stuff" we consume. What that stuff actually is is transitory and irrelevant from his standpoint.
Inspired by having stood on top of a Pennsylvania slag heap that stretched as far as the eye could see, Burtynsky created the notion of Manufactured Landscapes, whole areas of the planet reshaped (usually in some toxic fashion) by man.
If it sounds polemical, it isn't. Jennifer Baichwal's documentary is pretty much a tag-along affair, capturing the acclaimed photog at work and sharing the sense of fascination and even beauty he seems to find in images that are otherwise appalling.
Case in point: The "e-waste landfill." The camera follows Burtynsky to an immense landfill that is the dumping ground for 50% of the world's computer junk -- obsolete motherboards, circuit boards, memory chips, the works. There we see old folks, for that same couple of bucks a day, scraping recyclable metals off the circuitry while cadmium and other toxins leech into the water table. (The landfill city now imports its water).
There's an absurd formality in the scenes of Burtynsky interacting with the Chinese officials whose somewhat-suspicious okay makes his snooping possible.
And there's one segment that doesn't take place in China -- scenes of a "shipbreaking beach" in Bangladesh that were filmed a few years before Manufactured Landscapes' principal filming.
But the piece de resistance is the segment dealing with the controversial Three Gorges Dam, a monumental diversion project so immense it created a 400 km lake. We're informed in the film that when the sluices opened, scientists detected a wobble in the Earth's rotation. The project required some 1.5 million people to evacuate 13 cities, dismantling those cities brick-by-brick as they left. The cameras record that as well.
That alone would make Manufactured Landscapes a keeper.
BOTTOM LINE: Polemic-free, yet undeniably frightening -- and weirdly beautiful in its depiction of industrial ugliness. Cinematographer Peter Mettler -- who brings the sometimes-languid pace of his own films to this -- is practically the Picasso of the slow pan as he absorbs the lives of factory workers and industrial waste scrapers.
(This film is rated G)
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