Brian Boyd
Executive Editor
NEAR THE END of World War II, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in a letter that “the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter – leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously powerful. What’s their next move?”
If “show, don’t tell” is the motto of environmentalists as well as novelists, then the best way to answer Tolkien’s question is to sit down for an unnerving viewing of the documentary, Manufactured Landscapes. It might make you vow never again to buy something with a “made in China” sticker – and not for patriotic reasons.
The documentary follows photographer Edward Bur-tynsky, who has made a career out of finding the unnatural beauty in oil fields, quarries, and other transformed environments, in an eye-opening trek from the mushrooming Chinese coastal cities to the shipbreaking yards of Bangladesh. It is a rare opportunity to see, in constant juxtaposition, the sites of industrialization (the movie opens with an eight-minute-long pan through a monstrously large consumer-goods factory, the ominous music and never-ending line of machines bringing to mind the Star Destroyer shot from Spaceballs) along with both of its effects: Not just the enormous wealth that is created and consumed in the cities, but also the enormous waste that winds up in the countryside.
Burtynsky is above all a master of scale. A good portion of the movie consists in simple slideshows of his photographs, once the audience has been given the context of where the sites are and what is at stake. In his work, human elements – a man with a donkey, a worker on the Three Gorges Dam – are often used for contrast. It does indeed frequently seem that the tiny human could not possibly be in control of the enormous machinery that he or she has built, but that the “manufactured landscape,” once created, has taken on a life of its own. Those photographs without any human element, depicting brute force and unending machinery, seem all the more to confirm Tolkien’s premonitions.
But while Burtynsky’s photographs are on the macro level, director Jennifer Baichwal keeps the audience from being overwhelmed by her intermittent focus on individual people. Among the most haunting segments of the film were those which introduced us to old Chinese peasants. Some were incapable of adjusting to the changes – one old woman sat quietly knitting on the steps of her old tenement in Shanghai, rubble all around her as the buildings had been cleared and her neighbors evicted in forced urban renewal. Others had done so – former subsistence farmers were now making a few dollars a day as “e-waste” recyclers, breaking apart mountains of old computer parts by hand. The improvement in wage comes, we are told, at having poisoned the town’s water table from toxic runoff, with the government recently agreeing to ship water in for the villagers.
There are certain questions that are uncomfortable to ask, because the answers to them might demand that we do something differently. Our society, until recently at least, has been quite good at avoiding such questions as “What are the effects of our unprecedented prosperity?” or, much more simply, “Where do all our old computers go?”
Yet perhaps the great triumph of the film is that it avoids preaching. The views of its producers are clear enough thanks to the droning, foreboding soundtrack and the empathy displayed for those who are on the losing side of industrialization. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to leave the film overawed, not dismayed, at mankind’s ability to transform the face of the earth. As Burtynsky readily admits, “we don’t want to give up what we have,” and there are no easy solutions. For those who leave the film convinced that they have just seen with their own eyes that some sort of solution must be found, however, such knowledge is a crucial first step.
Contact Brian at bboyd@nd.edu.
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