Manufacturing China: new views of new landscapes

The film Manufactured Landscapes follows Canadian photographer Edward Burtynksy around China as he visits and captures what he calls, the sceneries “we disrupt in the pursuit of progress.” The images are as strikingly beautiful as they are deeply unnerving, and though the locales are strewn all over the rapidly industrializing nation, they are brought together through the theme of connections. This thread in turn emphasizes our own connection to these phenomena.

The film’s montage focuses on manufactured goods, connecting the products’ sites of creation and destruction. The film begins, therefore, with a hypnotizing five minute-long tracking shot through an assembly plant for household electrical goods. The last work station we see is the final step in the production of electronic irons. Director Jennifer Baichwal then transplants us to a metal scrap yard where people gather recyclable metals. Our first image of this metallic moonscape is the bottom of an electronic iron. Baichwal immediately places Western viewers in the film because we are the connection linking the Chinese manufactories and landfills. Between the symbolic births and deaths of these household goods, both located in China, they are shipped to Europe and North America to be bought, used, and thrown away.

The following segment of the film, similarly, follows Burtynsky to a shoot in an eWaste dump. As he states that “fifty percent of the world’s computers end up in China,” we see a dense landscape of microchips, motherboards, mice, and monitors. Minimum-wage workers sort through the trashed computer parts to get metals and components that can be sold or re-used. Meanwhile we learn that many of the products and materials used in computer parts are harmful or even poisonous in such large quantities. Burtynsky, however, makes a conscious point of not politicizing his images so that we are left to draw our own conclusions, implicitly reminded at every step of our connection to this process.

After seeing the toxic eWaste fields, therefore, we are quickly whisked back to a manufactory where we witness a dexterous young employee assemble a breaker switch in about twenty seconds, one of 400 she assembles in a work day. How many of her breaker switches will end up in another eWaste field we can only guess. Before they end up in the trash however, Baichwal and Burtynsky take us to shipbuilding yards and shipping docks, the means by which the breaker switches will be connected to the Western consumer. As Burtynsky puts it, while we watch the futuristic container cranes and shipbuilding landscapes glimmering with activity, “this is the reason globalization has been able to take the proportions it has.”

The following segment, however, proves that even the mammoth shipping vessels are subject to the pattern of creation, consumption, and destruction. The next connection in Manufactured Landscapes takes Burtynsky to a ship-breaking beach in Bangladesh. A spellbinding landscape of tidal flats spotted with decaying freighter corpses is the first of several in the film which are truly biblical in scale and grandeur.

Burtynsky is from Saint Catherine, Ont., and first began photographing post-industrial landscapes when he stumbled on an abandoned mining town after getting lost driving in rural Pennsylvania. Manufactured Landscapes was originally the title of an exhibition of photographs taken all over the world, not just in China, which traveled to Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 2004. Burtynksy explains that the film focuses on his photo shoots in China since they epitomize the speed and scale of the landscapes which are being created by industrialization and globalization.

The film is as sumptuous visually as it is shocking politically and environmentally, and director of photography Peter Mettler, makes great use of the contrast between his moving images and Burtynsky’s still photographs. On several occasions Mettler presents us with what appears at first to be one of Burtynsky’s haunting stills. But when one small element in the image begins to flutter in the wind, we realize how completely static the bleak landscape is. Baichwal is also very clever in the way she presents Burtynsky’s still photographs. By beginning focused on a small detail and slowly zooming out to reveal the vast magnitude of the photographed landscapes, she emphasizes the material density and human isolation of Burtynsky’s images. Finally, composer Dan Driscoll provides an eccentric but very fitting soundtrack which echoes the human alterations to a natural state which feature throughout the film.

Manufactured Landscape’s final segment connects the cities being submerged by the Three-Gorges Dam project to the incessant and destructive build-up of modern Shanghai. This provides a final connection to us Western viewers, as Shanghai’s endless skyline becomes a bigger and more rapidly-changing version of New York or London. How many more of these dramatic and disturbing landscapes will be created all over the globe if the entire Chinese population one day consumes at the same rate as a New Yorker or Londoner does today? As Burtynsky concludes, this puts us in “an uncomfortable spot where we don’t want to give up what we have, but we realize that what we’re doing causes problems that run deep. This creates a situation that needs a whole new way of thinking.” Manufactured Landscapes is a must-see, as much for its beauty as for the eloquent way it articulates our uncomfortable connection to these landscapes.

Note: This article was published on 27 November 2006 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.