Manufactured landscapes by Jennifer Baichwal

A very slow and contemplative documentary about the ecological footprint of the human race on Earth, controlled and enlarged by individuals, governments and companies. We are living in the new, suicidal era of globalization and heavy urbanization, industrialization and reorganization, waste and recycling ; in developed countries as well as in the Third World. Engineers in China are demolishing huge sections of a town in order to build the world’s largest dam. Peasants are dismantling leaking oil tankers in a Bangladesh shipyard. Endless rows of factory labourers are busy with monotonous activities. Mines, dumps, plants with hopeless workers and a dying environment.

This expansion of consumer society and the impacts of vast projects of modern over-civilization produce strange, artificial landscapes. The scenery changes in a very peculiar way : the observer cannot decide whether it’s beautiful or tragic.

In a 2-in-1 work of ’pictures within a picture’, the filmmakers are shooting Canadian photographer (Edward Burtynsky), who makes panoramic landscapes of industrial areas. But we can’t really decide what’s beyond the frame, what’s in Burtynsky’s focus. Is it a mission to call people’s attention to these symptoms ? Or simple aesthetics : making art images ? If the latter, the German photographic artist of globalization, Andreas Gursky, does it better.

Balázs Simonyi