In the opening moments of Manufactured Landscapes, the camera makes a slow, steadily framed journey down an assembly line where workers in yellow and blue toil interminably over an indeterminable product somewhere in modern-day China. Each nuanced maneuver—pulling, sorting, fastening—warrants its own deep row of assiduous young workers who occasionally pause and face the camera directly. It's strong enough as a polemic about the tyranny of sweatshops, but there's something distracting and arresting about the repetitive colors and lines of the scene that makes it something more. It's economics, sure, but it's also art.
It is on this type of insight that photographer Edward Burtynsky has built a twenty-some year career, taking beautiful pictures not just of factories, but also of mines, shipyards, dams, junkyards, and quarries in all their terrifying splendor. But in Manufactured Landscapes, it is filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal who captures Burtynsky's vision as he searches for the right angle and light while murmuring about global oil reserves, changing natural landscapes, and art's ability to transcend the political. Burtynsky's epigraphic narration has authority in the story (there are no activists or art critics blathering), but as Baichwal's lens often strays to the faces and voices of the enmeshed industrial workers, it is stronger than merely a master's tour of one stunning still after another. The audience is presented with a solemn and multidimensional portrait that adds another layer to the world captured in Burtynski's dizzying art. It's scenic, scary, and strangely spiritual.
—Mythili G. Rao
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