User Reviews

This is a documentary that came out of the splendid work of a Canadian landscape photographer whose interest has long been in the ravages left on earth by the excavations or buildings of man. It begins with a vast factory complex crammed with people making a great variety of little things, parts of high-tech equipment presumably; it isn't really made very clear. The emphasis is on how big the place is and how many people are there and how they're herded around outside in little yellow jackets. The film also shows the photographer working on a tall structure to do a still of the array of these people outside the factory, and talking with his crew as he does so. This is a world of relentless industrialization. It's a relief at least to know these soulless images aren't going to be presented without a human voice, as is the case in Nikolaus Geyrhalter's gleefully cold documentary about the food industry, 'Our Daily Bread.' 'Manufactured Landscapes' contains images of people scavenging e-waste and a town (many towns, really) being wiped out by the biggest dam ever, with a single plangent trademark shot of a little girl in the rubble of her own neighborhood eating out of a bowl using a pair of chopsticks almost bigger than she is. Some of these scenes, the ones with miserably underpaid workers slaving in dangerous and toxic places, might have been shot memorably by the premier engagé photographer Sebastião Salgado. But this photographer isn't as interested in seeing people up close. His orientation places him somewhere in between Salgado and the cold, neutral modern landscape photographs of Lewis Baltz.

All this happens in China, of course, though there is earlier footage in black and white of the photographer working around a large shipbuilding site in Bangladesh. It is backed up by music in a New Age industrial style that is alternately soothing and oppressive. There are a good many stills of the photographer's work--or were some of them made by the film crew? It isn't made clear.

Edward Burtynsky is the name of the photographer. We see people wandering through exhibitions of his beautiful work-- big dramatic prints of carefully composed view camera color images with a handsome glow. The irony is that Burtynsky makes such unique and glorious pictures of places that are essentially blighted, and to the ordinary eye are dispiriting and boring. He admits himself that he takes no political stand. When we are able to compare his images with those caught by the roaming eye of the film's cinematographer Peter Mettler, Burtynsky's work almost amounts to a kind of glorification, and hence falsification. But he is showing us places that, if we look closely, reveal their full dark story of ravage and neglect no matter how finely crafted the photographs of them may be.

Logically, but not entirely fortunately, it is Burtynsky whose voice-overs narrate most of the film as it ranges over various sites. Burtynsky's "epiphanies" may have inspired his decades of fine work, but they amount to nothing but truisms about how we're changing the planet irreparably; are dependent on oil, which will run out; that China has come into the game of massive industrialization late, and so may burn out early with the depletion of fossil fuel. The interest of 'Manufactured Landscapes' would be much greater if there were perceptive new ideas to accompany it. The reasons for watching it are two: to see glimpses of Burtynsky's work and the raw materials, the spaces he visits and chronicles so beautifully; and to observe scenes from the vast, awesome, daunting, and rather horrifying industrialization of modern China.

Because of the limitations of the narration, the idea of the title 'Manufactured Landscapes' feels insufficiently developed. It even seems a misnomer. New landscapes they are, but they are the byproduct of manufacturing rather than "manufactured." 'Landscapes of Waste' or 'Wasted Landscapes' might be better titles. There is much room left by this documentary for more intellectually searching work on film about this intriguing subject; and those who want to know more about Edward Burtynsky might do better to peruse his books or exhibitions.

I have been an admirer of Edward Burtynsky's work for years, and it was such a pleasure to be able to see the man at work, thanks to Jennifer Baichwal's documentary. The severe beauty of the ship-breaking yard in Bangladesh, the stone quarry in Vermont, the enormous assembly plant in China, the beleaguered old neighbourhoods in Shanghai that are just waiting to be torn down: these landscapes are captured so well by the photographer and the filmmaker.

At times I thought of old TV documentaries on abandoned coal mines and plastic-mold factories; the sort of stuff I grew up watching. Burtynsky's work has the great value of pointing out how the industrial activity has only shifted to Asia, it has not stopped. The strangest scene for me was the computer scrap-yard somewhere in China--the waste had a threatening air about it, while the workers were very jovial.

This film follows Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky to China where he documented the grim scale of Chinese industry and it's impact on the. landscape, obviously! Burtynsky's fascinating photos of industrial activity and waste have been exhibited widely, I saw the local exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario two years ago and came home with both the exhibition book of the same name and one of his framed 'quarry' prints. Now I've seen Jennifer Baichwal's film on the same topic. I think they've covered the media bases. Perhaps a role-playing game for PS3? So, thumbs up or down? Well, a thumb in each direction I think. The film gave visual context to Burtynsky's photos, which was helpful because sometimes you just can't believe that his images come from the real world. It also expanded them by capturing more of the human presence, which is often incidental in his photos. The film opened with a five minute tracking shot (shades of Robert Altman) along rows of bustling manual assembly lines. The scene showed both the monumental scale of China's industries and the massive and repetitive human activity that makes it possible. Watching a worker assemble a small electrical component at lightning speed and then later watching peasants tapping the metal off of computer chips for recycling reminded me that industry grinds down people as well as landscapes.

There were some clever juxtapositions that highlighted the economic divide in China. The remark "this is an open kitchen", for example, started while we watched a peasant's medieval outdoor stove in use but concluded while we watched the speaker, a Shanghai Realtor, show off her open-concept luxury kitchen.

The down side? Well, the film kind of dragged on (how many slow tracking shots can we sit through in a night?) and the sound track was excessively "industrial" and often grating.

Still, Manufactured Landscapes is a mind-expanding film that illuminates and expands on Edward Burtynsky vision and trusts the viewer to interpret it.

Are the main reason that has caused the wastes and the pollution this documentary showed to us. I really don't know how the planet Earth could ever recovered from such abuses by us. It's already a bit of outdated when I watched this movie in 2021.

There are lot of things that portrayed in it have been changed, but improvements and corrections are limited, most of the dreary scenes we saw in this movie are even from worse to worst, more uglier, more polluted, more destructive. Photographer, Edward Burtynsky and director Jennifer Baichwal, didn't shoot a sequel to us, so we just have to look elsewhere to know the current wasteland further deteriorated by us since 2006, but just our imagination, the prediction would be less hopeful than what we have seen in this documentary. Our Earth is definitely doomed.

This is the most recent addition to a new wave of educational documentaries like "The Corporation" and "Fahrenheit 9/11." Its commentary is clear and unwavering as is the breathtaking cinematic style of this well crafted feature. The film manages to impose a powerful sense of how unsteady our world is as we rush toward an environmentally unsustainable future at lightning speed - while showing us the terrifying beauty in our pursuit of progress.

Truly a remarkable accomplishment which must be seen by all who care about the world we leave to our children. Bravo!

NB - this is also the only film (of 8) at Varsity theaters (Toronto) boasting a stick-on tag which reads. "To arrange group viewings please contact. " . a further testament to the popularity and importance of this gem.

My bet. an academy award nomination for best documentary.

Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer who makes art out of the least "artful" objects imaginable. Everyday items such as crates, boxes, metal containers, etc. - items which most of us perceive as utilitarian at best and dismiss as being utterly without aesthetic merit - are instead converted into glorious objects d'art by Burtynsky's camera. He achieves this result by focusing on the recurring colors and geometric patterns that are apparently ever present in the industrialized world - for those perceptive enough to spot them, that is. Even heaps of compacted trash can become objects of beauty when seen through Burtynsky's lens (but didn't we already know that from "Wall-E"?). He is particularly interested in photographing areas like mines and shipyards where Man has already made incursions into nature - which may explain why at times even the people in his pictures (i.e. the workers in those places), with their uniform clothing and robotic movements, become part of the industrial landscape.

"Manufactured Landscapes," a documentary about Burtynsky's work, has much of the feel of a "Koyaanisqatsi" about it as it dazzles us with its richly variegated kaleidoscope of images and patterns. Indeed, director Jennifer Baichwal and cinematographer Peter Mettler capture the essence of the original photos in purely cinematic terms, as their own camera records Burtynsky and his assistant running photo shoots at a factory in China, a dockyard in Bangladesh, and the construction site at the massive Three Rivers Gorge Dam project in China. With their fluid camera-work, the filmmakers match point-for-point the beauty of Burtynsky's images. In fact, the movie opens with a stunning eight-minute-long tracking shot of a Chinese factory in which hundreds of similarly dressed workers toil away in perfectly symmetrical and color-coordinated rows.

The movie does less well when Burtynsky gets around to articulating the "themes" of his work, which, quite frankly, come out sounding confused, contradictory and decidedly half-baked at best. But it is as a purely aesthetic experience, highlighting image and form, that "Manufactured Landscapes" resonates most. In the case of Burtynsky, perhaps, a picture really IS worth a thousand words.

Mesmerizing, breathtaking and horrifying, this hauntingly beautiful film is the "Apocalypse Now" without fiction. Slow in pace, quiet in mood, it gives good glimpses of the poisoned patches of Earth that may well be signs of an inevitable doom.

There is no doubt in my mind -- the nature is plagued and we are the disease. Greed, the very essence of humanity that drives evolution and progress, has turned us into something like cancer, on its way to consume the host and die with it.

Manufactured Landscapes is quite an unforgettable viewing experience - at least I'll never regard my toaster and iron the same way again.

This felt a little like a companion piece to Wall-E briefly in the beginning; images of overwhelming waste, even nice compacted cubes of it a la that film. Then later it sort of connected for me with a book I recently read called "Lost on Planet China" by J. Maarten Troost, although that book wants to be a comedic monologue more than a travelogue/social commentary.

This film is humorless. Which is fine, but the notion that it is not a polemic, or even the photos alone are not political, is quite unfair, even if I do tend to lean the same way as the filmmaker's viewpoint. I understand that some people feel China is one huge Pittsburgh/Sheffield and that "we" are defiling our Mother Earth. I'm not entirely sure I buy that though.

I'm always a little suspicious of "the old ways are best" thinking. I'm generally pretty happy with increasing life-spans, and I know that change comes with costs. Ideally you minimize the damage, but I wondered how these filmmakers would depict the birth of a child. Notice the woman's body beforehand, but now in manufacturing a child, look at the gross distension of the innards, and once the child is finally delivered, observe the impact on the once-vibrant young couple as they struggle through endless hours of sleeplessness and toil with the mound of waste produced by just one child.

For some reason, I also expected the photography to be more artistic, a la "The War Photographer" (a film that I would recommend if you liked this one, or even if you just finished this one). I liked one of the Chinese people, examining a picture of him and remarking how the scale of the shot was so large that there was no detail. Nothing intimate.

Anyways, an interesting albeit strongly biased view of China. just the number of women workers in different positions was fascinating. Including the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" with the either attractive or repelling (or both for me?) Diana Lu, extravagant real estate agent, was kind of weird to me. Especially when contrasted with omitting the stonecutter, who was in the deleted scenes, well all choices are loaded.

I'll look for the photography book at the library, some of those shots with a green oval inside a strip mining pit show briefly in the film I wanted to understand more. I assume enhanced via filters/processing. Also the Bangladesh ship graveyard. while maybe meant to be a cautionary scaring about our wasteful ways was nonetheless compelling, like having a ringside seat to the La Brea Tar Pits back when the dinosaurs were laying down for extinction.

The legacy of China's rapid growth will be understood long after I am gone, and I'm not so sure that Eve and Wall-E will be weeping over the Great Wall crumbled down to build our great-great-great automaton grandchildren.