Manufactured Landscapes: A Portrait of Our March Toward Ecological Disaster (DVD)
A Film by Jennifer Baichwal
Watching "Manufacutured Landscapes" is a bit like attending an art exhibition. You may want to view it in 2 or 3 sittings. Burtynsky offers occasional narration and insight into his growth as an artist and how he came to focus on the ability of our species to create "manufactured landscapes" of industrial byproducts, many of them toxic.
At first, it may seem a little slow. There is no dramatic narrative here. But the power of the images and the interspersed narration, along with the actual documentary footage starts to swell up into a tidal wave of recognition: men and women have created an artificial construct in which to live, alienated from nature, with results that will come back to haunt us.
Burtynsky's brilliance -- and irony -- is that he can make an endless mountain of discarded tires both ominous and beautiful. There's something breathtaking about massive ships that are "discarded" on the sands of the Southeast, and then dismantled by local cottage industries of poor residents, with the parts and the scrap metal sold or bartered.
Al Gore personally awarded the film the first prize in the documentary category at the Nashville Film Festival, and his presentation is included in the extras.
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