Industrial wastelands and China’s insatiable appetite for growth are the sites of concern for Manufactured Landscapes and its subject, photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose large format images bring global consumption into sharp focus. CATHERINE BISLEY reviews.


Manufactured Landscapes opens as cinematographer Peter Mettler’s camera tracks across a factory floor. Flurries of young Chinese workers dressed in bright yellow assemble parts for some sort of kitchen appliance at benches that stretch to far windows; yellow lines on the concrete floor, piles of cardboard boxes and black plastic crates, draw the eye along this same path. The initial impression of a large scale operation pales as, over an eight minute traverse, the camera reveals bench upon bench. Scored to the hum of machinery, few of the workers look up from their repetitive work. The shot cuts to a wide-framed, high-angle photograph of the factory floor; a photo taken by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky’s work is at the centre of this disturbing documentary that tracks the changing landscapes of our time.

The exponential growth of the Chinese economy has prompted change on an unprecedented level: thus most of the ground covered in Manufactured Landscapes is in China. In the voice-overs sprinkled throughout the film, Burtynsky talks of wanting to show the production that is required to fulfil consumption. The enormity of the factories, quarries, cities and toxic wastelands he captures, challenge the limits of comprehension. His photographs are cunningly revealed: a small detail is framed and then zoomed out from. Much like the opening shot, you think that these images will reach their limit well before they do. Even when the whole photograph is revealed, Burtynsky frames many images in a way that suggests only a partial view.

Burtynsky provides a frame that allows the documentary to traverse a wide range of geographical and industrial landscapes. The portrait of the artist in action leads on to a more momentous picture: footage of people at an exhibition of his photos and of him giving a slide-show/talk are insipid when compared to the photographer in action. The artist frame also gives Manufacturing Landscapes perspectives that purely visual films like Koyanisqaatsi don’t have.

In 2000, photographer Jeff Powis travelled with Burtynsky to Bangladesh and the Three Gorges Dam project in China. The shaky, hand held, DV footage that he took on this trip provided the impetus for director Jennifer Baichwal to make Manufacturing Landscapes. Powis’s footage is the most engaging material in the documentary. Black and white footage of young men working on a ship breaking beach in Chittagong, Bangladesh, brings to mind a passage depicting slaves in a quarry in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Ship breaking beaches are notorious for their high mortality rate: accidents are rife and workers are exposed to asbestos, heavy-metals and other toxic wastes. Powis also shows displaced people breaking their city into pile upon pile of rubble to make way for the Three Gorges Dam reservoir – this area is now submerged. It’s both heartbreaking and eerie.

Just as I was beginning to wonder how they had obtained permission from the image conscious Chinese government to film and photograph such broad destruction, we see Burtynsky and the crew meeting resistance as the try to film a waste metal dump. The Chinese officials tell them that the “air is very dirty today,” it is “not a good day to take pictures” and that they are “concerned it will cause negative influence.” Burtynsky’s assistant gets out a book of photos “he will make it beautiful.” And the officials relent.

There is no denying that there is a strange beauty to his images. Burtynsky frames the geometric loops of furrowed hillsides, the cube-cut rock faces of a quarry, and pyramids of loose metal. He captures the intersecting lines of cranes, the skeletal forms of half constructed ships, and the vertigo inducing Three Gorges Dam. The colours are also striking: a toxic red nickel tailing cuts through black earth, lines of workers in bright pink uniforms bend over conveyer belts at a chicken processing plant, and the half dismantled forms of ships rise, as the red rust leeches across the mud flat.


Powis and Mettler’s footage is as important as Burtynsky’s photographs. The three men’s work is stylishly orchestrated: the editors using colour, line and content to create fluidity. An image of hundreds of yellow clad workers, surrounded by yellow buildings, cross fades to a field of sunflowers, though not an actual field – only a print on a factory wall. Footage from a clothes iron factory cuts to a disused iron in a heap of scrap metal. We are taken from a ship construction yard in China, directly to a ship breaking beach in Bangladesh. A man cooks on the street in Shanghai and then a real estate developer shows the documentary crew around her open plan kitchen. She then talks of old people refusing to change their ways, and of one particular case; an old lady who refused to move out of her home to make way for a high rise apartment. We then see the old lady sitting, surrounded by the rubble of her neighbours houses, quietly sewing.

Importantly, some of these images are complemented with interviews. It would have been good to have more. At the Three Gorges Dam, a tired elderly labourer smokes and looks out over the mass of unfinished concrete and steel:

Interviewer: The work, is it hard?
Labourer: Of course it’s hard.
Interviewer: Are you proud to be working on such a big project?
Labourer: I’m just a general labourer.

Unsurprisingly the day is long and the pay is meagre. Another worker is interviewed. He beams dubiously, says he’s proud to be working for the glory of his country. At Sentai Electrical a pretty young PR girl stumbles along nervously before asking if she can read from her notes. With their help, enthusiastic utterances about Sentai’s “corporate goal of excellence” flow freely. Inside the factory we see a young woman constructing circuit breaker after circuit breaker with robotic speed. Back at the iron factory a woman tests steam nozzle fitting after steam nozzle fitting and, at an Electronic Waste township, workers in flimsy protective masks are bent double, while trawl through piles of scrap metal. Mettler’s footage captures something the photographs can not. Stillness overlooks the frenzy and monotony of production.

On their own, Burtynsky’s photographs are both pleasing to the eye and terrifying. But his wide scope has a tendency to dehumanize. A disappointed labourer comments on not being able to make himself out in a photo: “It’s very broad. It’s hard to see the detail.” Seen alongside Mettler and Powis’s footage, we see how Burtynsky can cut through industrial smog, sharpen edges and colours. It is through the stylish combination of these three men’s work and the associated interviews that we are confronted. While it largely avoids “we have to take responsibility” soundbytes, Manufactured Landscapes amounts to a trenchant criticism of galloping global consumption. China got legs, who can stop it?