crossposted at UndercurrentsPHOTO by EDWARD BURTYNSKY

If Deliverance lost its plot, became self-consciously artsy, and declared itself apolitical, it would be called Manufactured Landscapes.

For its handful of shortcomings, Jennifer Baichwal’s film–billed first as a “documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky“–is worth a look.

Shortcomings

1. Without knowing that this is intended as a documentary on Burtynsky, the film would appear to include weird editorial choices, like the unnecessary shots of Burtynsky taking photos. Even with knowing this, it’s something that does not do anything for the film, except for the scene when he is trying to get permission to photograph mines.

2. Only calling itself a documentary on an artist when Burtynsky‘s subject matter lends itself to deeper investigation. Whenever people pretend to not be political, I have to ask what it is they are so afraid of. You don’t have to check only one box next to your name. You can be an artist and political.

3. Early in the film, it appears that it is arranged for factory workers to line up in particular groupings between the huge buildings. I’m not sure if this would qualify as exploitation (they might have been thrilled to get a break from work, or, they might have been asked to do this off the clock), but it certainly seems too planned. I hope the workers got something for their trouble.

4. The film seriously needs to be re-edited. The commentary and dialog is painfully sparse, and there are those awkward shots that really don’t belong.

Manufactured Landscapes opens with a tedious sequence that reflects the nature of the scene’s subject: factory work. The viewer is guided through an unfathomably enormous factory in which the images of uniformity (workers and their stations) create a visual contradiction to the chaos of the refuse that their work eventually becomes. The irony of watching all of this from a seat in a reclaimed factory is not lost on me.

After the initial sequence, the pace picks up considerably, though not ever in a Kill Bill kinda way. The film’s audience is taken from the factory to communities that seem run by the business of managing e-waste–the innards of recycled computers, telephones, and the like. At one point Baichwal shows a shipyard in China, then with little explanation, drops the audience in Bangladesh. This is one of the areas in the film where a better segue is needed. One really can’t expect a film audience to do much work guessing at how some things are connected, especially when they have all these larger issues to consider. Later, the displacement, disconnect, and relocation alluded to thematically culminates with the story of how the construction of a dam in China has forced 13 cities and over 1,000,000 to move.

But that’s all just plot, a description of the “what,” rather than the “how.” What saves the documentary from being overly self-indulgent or moralizing is how these changing ways of life are portrayed. While Burtynsky tells about having an oil epiphany (if you don’t know, plastic is derived from oil, thus, our car culture is only one aspect of the oil addiction), the audience sees many of the components of this insight–steering wheel, car, and tar all as part of a photograph of one congested, clusterfuck of a freeway. The images of computer innards and scrap metal made me wonder what kind of shithole we’re leaving for the inevitably mutated-like- the-three-eyed-nuclear-waste-fish-in-The Simpsons next generations to inherit. Before I finished that uplifting thought, I was presented with more fodder–images of children playing on and eating near piles of trash hills, as if that’s a perfectly normal thing to do. For many people in the world, living on, around, and off of garbage is increasingly becoming the norm. Lately, hating on China for producing lead paint-encrusted toys for our darling children is all the rage; in this understandable fury, what is lost is the fact that the injury of innocents goes both ways. Lead and other poisons from our dearly departed desktops seep into the soil and water in China where these machines are dumped. As shown in the film, there are places that have to ship bottled water in because their own supply has been destroyed by our e-waste.

Why focus the film on China when Burtynsky is a Canadian with Ukrainian roots, and so much large scale destruction is happening around the globe, like we see being caused by the extraction industry? Go ahead and speculate, or see the film.

Manufactured Landscapes is playing at Real Art Ways until Sunday, August 26th.