Manufactured Landscapes
Rarely have I been so moved by images of landscapes. But "Manufactured Landscapes" does not show the tranquility of nature or the majesty of mountains abouve a sea. It's a film, that shows the earth's ends of the manufacturing revolution. In China, the manufacturer to the world, everything from clothing irons to the worlds biggest dam is being built and the population that is being uprooted along the way is huge.
One of the statistics in the film was that in 1990, China was 70% rural, 30% urban. The Chinese government, through massive restructuring of the economy and population, wants to shift the country to 30% rural, 70% urban. And they are operating with a population of 1.3 billion people.
These are just some of the insights from the new documentary "Manufactured Landscapes". The opening landscape of the movie takes the viewer through a massive factory somewhere in China. We scroll past row after row of labourers assembling parts and products. It's a massive floor space and after 10 minutes, the camera has not finished passing by copies of the same bench rows with similarly conformed workers.
Scrolling blindness started to set in for me after the camera showed the massive scale of coal, nickel and silver mines, ship yards, ship assembly yards, shipping cranes, construction cranes, e-waste fields, factories, cities, all sprawled out like industrial zombies. It was definitely something that raised my level of consciousness about any part of the earth that is being extracted and manufactured.
The filmmaker specifically stated that he was not praising nor condemning this landscape. But merely showing it as part of what we and the planet are undergoing in our "progress". My reaction was a kind of existential horror; to know, to see that that's what's going on out there. I'd recommend this film to anyone who is actually interested in the effects of massive environmental and social dislocation. I left the film completely sober.
Posted by Timothy Washington on 2007.04.02 | Original post
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