On the Edge & Manufactured Landscapes

The picture is taken from Manufactured Landscapes, directed by Jennifer Baichwal in 2006. The film follows the journey of a photographer, who is on the mission of documenting the changes in landscapes caused by the developing industry all over the world. The piece was inspired by works of Andreas Gursky, a German visual artist particularly interested in architectural and land scenes. His large-scale, color photographs on deserted routes, huge blockhouses and salesrooms - often taken from a high point of view, show the ironic beauty of capitalism. At the same time, these photos make us aware of the fact that if we can be delighted by the picture of the crowded Tokyo Stock Exchange, we definitely have urgent socio-cultural topics to think about.

Take the scene of Leila Kilani’s On the Edge in which we discover several places in Andreas Gursky’s style: white dressed women are sitting next to each other in neon light, concentrating on their never-ending tasks. The talented Moroccan director examines the possibilities of two women working in a shrimp-processing factory of Tangier’s poorest neighbourhood. Badia and Imane, the main characters of the story, are not children of the industrial revolution, but they are simple slaves of it, and they believe they can find a better world and more chances in the city’s ‘Free Zone’. The film harshly criticises the effects of capitalism, meanwhile weighs the good and harmful consequences of globalisation as well.

To understand the role of industrial landscapes in the cinematic arts, we have to go back to the earliest beginnings. For instance, Metropolis, the 1927 movie by Fritz Lang, tells about a Utopian society which is divided into two parts: one part for the comfortable rulers, another for the invisible workers of the factories. This early movie already discovered the possibility of the visual structure dominating events shown in the scenes. The dynamic, sharp, black-and-white lines and the impressive pictures of the moving mass give the joyful/desperate feeling of living in a techno cult community with all its advantages and disadvantages.

Even though the cinema industry is also considered a ‘factory’, the authors rarely take upon themselves to go into a real industrial environment. A few exceptions to this are for example Eraserhead by David Lynch or Dancer in the Dark, a musical film by Lars von Trier. Both take place in a depressive technological milieu which provides an unquestionable aesthetic, but questionable lifetime experience. Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert show women in industrial environments, and guide us to the contemporary dilemma of alienation. It seems that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the only recent cinematic example of factories presented as colourful and ideal places, but unfortunately we can be sure that they are limited to our imagination.

Existing in a modern environment gives a specific chance for contemporary society to define itself. The definition can happen through the feeling of independence from nature or the free forms of design. The abstract structures of artificial objects help to flare modern dilemmas, and also inspire to start dialogue on them. Such films like On the Edge find the way to use manufactured landscapes as a set and the way to ask these hard questions in their most natural form.

By Janka Barkoczi