Last night I went to a poker game at a friend’s house. From where I sat I could see, in another room, his large flat-screen TV showing a scene from Manufactured Landscapes (2006), a documentary by Jennifer Baichwal that I had just screened at my film series two months ago. My friend saw me looking at his TV and asked if I was familiar with the film and when I informed him that it had been in my last film program he responded with surprise. His reaction immediately told me two things. One: he had not rented this dvd based on having read about it from my calendar. Two: If even my friends who like obscure films aren’t checking out the only arthouse film calendar in town it’s safe to assume that current attendance numbers, already low, are only going to get worse. That’s the bad news. The good news is that this challenging Canadian documentary that follows around photographer Edward Burtynsky, and that kicks off with one continuous and eight-minute-long tracking shot that moves about a third of a mile down a 480-meter-long factory in China, is finding an enthusiastic audience amidst the Netflix crowd.

I first came across Burtynsky’s work in 2001 when I saw some of his photographs from the ship-breaking grounds of Chittagong, Bangladesh, which really made an impression on me. Since my father is a photographer I convinced my siblings to chip in for his birthday that year to buy a limited-edition book put out by Lumiere Press. It was titled Residual Landscapes: Studies of Industrial Transfiguration and it was “quarter bound, by hand, in black Canapetta book cloth with burgundy Bugra paper over boards.” And, no, I don’t know what Canapetta or Bugra mean except for the fact that it wasn’t going to be cheap; ergo my enlistment of the siblings on the purchase of this gift. One of the highlights, for me, about the film Manufactured Landscapes was that it showed some scenes from that eerie landscape in Bangladesh that first led to that book purchase. And, since Burtynsky works with “large-scale” photographs (aka: “macroscopic panoramas”) to begin with, their impact is only enhanced on the big screen – be it a movie screen or a poster-sized plasma screen.

Aside for the impressive sight of huge rusting freight ships being dismantled for their metal, viewers of Manufactured Landscapes will also see mountains of computer parts being sifted through by people looking for bits to recycle, assembly line action in which circuit breakers are assembled by human hands at lightning speed, and impressive views of the Yangtze River Three Gorges Dam project – a monumental endeavor that has moved 13 cities. The project is so massive in scope that scientists say the weight being shifted will actually have a noticeable effect on the wobble of the earth. (I’m going by memory here and am guessing that the use of the word “wobble” is of my own fabrication, but you get the idea.)

Manufactured Landscapes is pitched by its distributor (Zeitgeist Films) as being in “the spirit of such environmentally enlightening sleeper-hits as An Inconvenient Truth and Rivers and Tides.” Others have also mentioned Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka, and Our Daily Bread as films that share similar thematic elements. Burtynsky himself isn’t one to preach and Baichwal’s style does touch ground to interact with its subjects every now and then, so the overall approach finds a middle-ground to the aforementioned films that allows for both a sense of immediacy (and alarm) as well as for a sense of detached awe (and horror).

To listen to a Q&A with Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky at New York’s Film Forum, go to:

http://01f070d.netsolhost.com/mp3/ManufacturedJune202007.mp3