by MARK SLUTSKY

Edward Burtynsky’s photographs are massive in scale. They capture mountains, rivers and seashores that dwarf the tiny human figures that sometimes appear in his shots. Whether or not figures can be seen, the human presence looms large, as his pictures focus on the incredible impact of industry on the natural landscape: huge quarries mined from mountain ranges, cyclopean dam projects, rivers that burn red with nickel by-products and shipyards where supertankers are run aground and torn apart by hand.

Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Manufactured Landscapes is a portrait, not of Burtynsky, necessarily, but of his work, of the strange and terrible beauty of industry seen through his eyes. “Burtynsky is the author of everything in the film, rather than the subject,” she says. “Which is different. Everything you see comes from his perspective but he’s not right there in the middle of it.”

Stories in close-up

“I knew from the very beginning I didn’t want to do a biographical film,” she continues. “And I didn’t want to do a ‘portrait of an artist’ film. I wanted our film to try to extend the narrative streams that are inherent in these photographs. When you’re standing in front of one of the prints, you’re confronted with the wide view, and it’s often overwhelming, and it’s aesthetically very seductive. Then you look in and you see the hundreds or thousands of details in these photographs that are all little stories and narratives that can be picked up. We would pick them up in the medium of film and follow them, and keep coming back to the wide view.”

That’s perhaps best expressed by the film’s already famous opening shot, an incredible 10-minute dolly through a huge Chinese manufacturing plant, that ultimately pulls back to reveal the factory in its entirety—the final image of which is almost identical to a Burtynsky print. With no music and few titles, it’s hypnotic.

“We decided that was the only way to give a sense of the scale of this place—this factory floor was almost a kilometre long,” Baichwal says. “We did it a few ways, and every time we’d blow through a whole roll of film, because it was about 10 minutes, so it was kind of nerve-wracking.”

“Our commissioning editor at TVO said, ‘It’s an ambitious opening shot, it’s very long, so if you’re going to use it, load it up, with music and credits and stuff.’ We tried it, and it was the worst mistake, because it actually made you not look at all at what was going on.”

Toxic tension

There’s a strange tension in Burtynsky’s work, which Manufactured Landscapes doesn’t shy away from: how can something so brutal, so violent to the Earth, so toxic, be so beautiful?

“There’s an ambiguity in his work, where the same photographs can hang on the walls of the corporations that are responsible for these places that we visited, and on the walls of the environmentalists who are fighting against those corporations,” Baichwal says with a laugh. “And it also allows people who would normally walk away from something much more stridently political and just say, ‘No, I don’t agree with that at all,” to engage in it and perhaps be changed by it. And I think that the film tries to do that too. It tries not to preach, it tries to witness, I suppose.”

In fact, that measured tone seems to be, in a sense, what attracted Baichwal to Burtynsky’s work. “I got captivated by the quarry pictures initially,” she says, “Because, to me, it was such a perfect simple metaphor of literally what we take out of the earth to make the things that we do—these holes in the earth. I was also very struck by the fact that his work is very consciousness-changing, but in a non-didactic way. The photographs don’t preach at you but they allow you to think about the way that we impact the planet by living on it, in a way that is open-ended, which I think is really rare, especially with most existing environ mental discourses.”

Messing things up

Shooting in China, site of the unprecedented, enormous Three Gorges Dam Project and many of Burtynksy’s other subjects, proved itself to be somewhat of a challenge; there were the obvious struggles getting permission from a bureaucracy very conscious of its global image. And yet, according to Baichwal, that wasn’t the hardest part: “Some of the industrial environments we were in were so devoid of any organic life that they were terrifying,” she says. “It was devastating for us to be in these places for a few hours, or a couple of days, and there are people who are there every day. That’s what was terrible to me.

“Part of me was thinking that it’s very important we don’t say this film is about China. It’s not about China. It’s about all of us. It’s about our implication in this industrial revolution. Everything going on there is for markets over here. All of our runners, and all of our clothes, and all of the stupid little things that we think we need to buy, like iPods, which are all made in China. So this is about us, and China’s doing what every other country has done throughout history. They know that they’re messing things up, they just think that they’ll be able to industrialize, make money, get dirty, clean up later.

“And the scale is just so huge, and it’s happening so quickly, that I don’t think they have the luxury of making the same mistakes that everybody else has. That was scary. As Ed says, we’re approaching an edge, and what are we going to do when we get there? Are we all going to jump off the cliff, like lemmings? Are we going to drown, or are we going to find a solution?”

Manufactured Landscapes opens this Friday, Dec. 15

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