The Big Picture

Reporting for work: Labourers gather at Cankun factory in Zhangzhou, China, in a scene from the Jennifer Baichwal film Manufactured Landscapes. (Edward Burtynsky/Mongrel Media)

The documentary Manufactured Landscapes opens with a long, slow tracking shot of a factory in China: row after row of workers in lemon-coloured uniforms, fingers twisting and capping plastic and metal. The shot goes on and on, almost to the point of comedy. How big is this factory, anyway, and what exactly are they making? Eventually, the explanation for all that effort is revealed: pastel-handled irons.

The endlessness and semi-absurdity of this scene of mass production is a fitting lead for a film about Edward Burtynsky, the St. Catharines, Ont.-born photographer whose art documents the eternal process — the before, during and after — of the things we consume. A still version of the aforementioned scene is now one of Burtynsky’s most famous photos, but on film, it becomes something entirely different.

“What I wanted to do was start with Ed’s work as a departure point and have our footage extend the narratives that are inherent in those photographs,” says Jennifer Baichwal, the director of Manufactured Landscapes. “I wanted to try to recreate the visceral experience I always had standing in front of one of Ed’s photographs, which was like meditating on my impact on the planet by living here.”

While the landscape photograph, a hotel-art staple, is hardly in vogue, Burtynsky’s painfully modern and world-renowned pictures revive the 18th-century notion that the landscape is a direct route to the sublime. Not only is Burtynsky’s vision of our industrialized planet so beautiful as to contain divinity, it sets off a feeling of terror, an important aspect of the sublime, according to philosopher Edmund Burke. Burtynsky has crossed the globe taking his unholy-yet-beautiful wide-camera photos of discarded tire mountains in the U.S. and giant skeletons of steam liners in a Bangladesh shipyard. But there was always one unvisited place on his mind.

“I had to go to China, of course,” says Burtynsky, a tall, warm man with a wide handshake. “I was obsessed with this idea of where do all the computers go to die?”

Photographer Edward Burtynsky. (Steve Carty/CBC)

Working with a Canadian living in China — “my fixer; he made everything possible,” says Burtynsky — the artist spent months going back and forth between Toronto and China, planning photos of the world’s latest monuments to progress, the Three Gorges Dam and the “e-waste” sites where villagers pry apart discarded computers for toxic parts. Burtynsky’s fixer warned him that while the Chinese government is trying openness on for size in anticipation of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it’s often an ill-fitting, uncomfortable suit.

“We would regularly get busted and taken into the police station,” says Burtynsky. The Shanghai police were particularly unimpressed when he attempted to shoot a lone house in a field of plowed rubble, flanked on all sides by the kinds of famous skyscrapers that now define architectural advancement. In China, this rush for development also means the displacement of citizens.

“This woman [in the photograph] was a hold-out. She just wouldn’t leave her house, and the government was very sensitive about that,” says Burtynsky. “But I had letters from foreign affairs in Beijing, letters from the Canadian Embassy, so they never destroyed our film.”

There are hints of such backroom tension in the film, but Baichwal mostly concentrates on capturing Burtynsky at work, planning and shooting. Baichwal has made documentaries about other prominent artists, including photographer Shelby Lee Adams and author Paul Bowles. She almost always eschews the “talking head” route. In fact, there is very little dialogue in the film.

“I’m not interested in a traditional artist-at-work profile because the clichés are a minefield, and it’s very difficult to represent one medium in another,” Baichwal says.

Her husband and producer, Nick de Pencier, usually shoots Baichwal’s movies, but because they have two young children whom they couldn’t leave parent-less for a month, Toronto filmmaker Peter Mettler (Gambling, Gods and LSD) agreed to act as director of photography. On buses crowded with Chinese government “minders,” translators, drivers, assistants and a film crew, Baichwal’s team followed Burtynsky around China for three and a half weeks.

“One thing I wanted to avoid saying was, ‘China’s bad.’ This isn’t about China. This is about us,” says Baichwal. “I do think his photographs bring about consciousness of your impact as a consumer in a very different way than reading an environmental treatise. They’re aesthetically stunning, and then, of course, you realize the implication of what you’re looking at.”

Orange alert: Nickel tailings from mining operations near Sudbury, Ontario. (Edward Burtynsky/Mongrel Media)

Baichwal has made an aesthetically stunning film herself — it won the Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature at this month’s Toronto International Film Festival. But was it necessary? Why would Burtynsky consent to participate in a film about his work, when the work clearly speaks for itself?

“The still image does tell a story to an extent, but that expanded frame, the ability to go into time and space, is something that only happens with film,” says Burtynsky. “And a film opens up my work to a new range of people. Once your work gains momentum in the world, it sits in a museum or a gallery environment and that’s a pretty narrow band of society.”

Reaching the largest possible audience is more the concern of an activist than an artist, and Burtynsky clearly sees himself as the latter. He admits his imperfections. “I fly. I drive. There is silver in my film,” he says. “I know that I’m culpable, and I know that what we’ve created is not sustainable, it’s fraying at the edges. You can go from denial, and step right into despair, or you can go from denial — which is how most of us live — into hope.”

To that end, Burtynsky lends his images to a non-profit organization called Worldchanging.com and is developing a program to teach young kids about sustainability.

“[My] daughters are eight and 12,” he says. “We take them into the country all the time and they run free. They go in the creek and catch frogs, and we always want them to know nature. We want them to see how they fit in.”

Manufactured Landscapes opens Sept. 29 in Toronto.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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