Budd and I watched this documentary, Manufactured Landscapes, the other night, which is about Edward Burtynsky, a really good photographer, who goes to China and basically photographs lots and lots of big things (think Three Gorges Dam) and lots of industrial waste and environmental destruction. One of the most interesting things about this film to me was Burtynsky’s own remark that, here he was, photographing all this environmental doom and gloom for the world to see, yet he has a part in it – the silver in his camera, the jet it took to get him there, etc. This emphasizes, to me, the dichotomy in many people (not everyone) involved so-called “green” movement – you want to make a “difference” yet you’re contributing to the problem. We all are contributing to the problem by our very nature of being human beings. And until we as a species are wiped out by some fortuitous asteroid, we may as well face that it just ain’t gonna stop.
Here I offer an excerpt of an interview with the filmmaker, Jennifer Baichwal, and Burtynsky, as interviewed by Michael Guillen. The full interview is here, and the full documentary is below.
Guillén [interviewer] : That leads me to ask: you with your photography appear not to indict anyone; you seem more to be of witness.
Burtynsky [photographer and subject of the film]: Yes.
Guillén: And yet there’s a tension in the film. D.K. Holm at The Greencine Daily actually suggests the film is schizophrenic because—countering your photographic stance as a mere witness—Jennifer’s documentary carries a more incriminative stance emphasizing her concerns, one might say her panic.
Baichwal [filmmaker]: Certainly I think—and Ed can answer this too—but I think when Ed first started out, he acknowledges his own implication and he also acknowledges the complexity of this situation. Many environmental discourses are just too polarizing and too simplistic. They just don’t move people because you can’t be that radical. People are not going to drop everything and go live in a tent somewhere. I think that the acknowledgment of implication—that everything you do affects in some way—when Ed talks about everything being made of oil or the silver in his camera and I think about the dirty process of filmmaking and the chemicals that we use and all of that, even traveling here, our carbon footprint getting on a jet, all of those things, acknowledging them without laying blame and without assuming that there’s an easy answer, we try to also do that in the film. We really did. We tried to present the complexity without leading one perspective more than the other. It is true that people working in these factories have more money than they did when they were living in the countryside. They’re not necessarily unhappy. There’s a hundred people or more waiting to take their job if they stop, if they decide they want to form a union or something and get fired; but, the cumulative effect of being in all of these environments—and my own personal experience of it—was such that I felt that I could not [deny] that we are at a precipice. The symbol of what is happening in China right now—where whole zones are collapsing in an environmental sense, where you can’t drink the water anymore, where the earth is polluted—is for me a crisis. I was not trying to be overtly political because that wouldn’t honor the photographs, but perhaps my own reaction to being in these places is what colored in some way the way that the film progresses and the way that it ends, which is kind of on a dark note. It’s a heavy film.
Guillén: Not to deny that, but, the aesthetic arrest that I experience looking at Ed’s photographs and the manner by which you extend his narrative through your documentary and prolong that state of aesthetic arrest is one of mindblowing scale—the immensity, the grandiosity, the largesse, as Ed put it—becomes a means of eloquence and uncomfortable beauty. It’s like Job looking into the whirlwind. It’s something so powerful in its scale that one is filled with awe. It is, in effect, awe-full, to grasp the source of that word. How can we call it beautiful if we want to survive as a species?
On the other hand—and to your credit, Ed—one of the most tender inflections in your photography and a personal face through which the political pours forth, is in the portrait you took of the old Chinese woman sitting on her front landing beside a pile of e-waste. Though on the complete opposite spectrum of your more characteristic work, that one image spoke volumes. As you stated in your interview with PingMag, Jennifer, facial close-ups “dignify the individual in this completely undignified landscape.” Following through on that human accent, I likewise appreciated your interviews of the workers. By contrasting the human and industrial scales, each came into focus through an intriguing comparative tension. This was brought up even within the film where some of the workers you were filming were shown Poloroids of Ed’s compositions and one of the workers commented, “This is a very broad view and you lose the detail.” But you don’t lose the detail. The detail is encoded in the breadth of view. Breadth itself becomes the detail.
Burtynsky: Right.
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Right. Burtynsky is undeniably a highly-regarded and highly-talented photographer. And this is a very visually interesting film, I highly recommend it. However, it magnifies what I feel about people who are suddenly (and I use that word with great gravitas) so eager to be green. Were they eager to be green 8 years ago? Even 5 years ago? Before “An Inconvenient Truth” came out? Burtynsky himself acknowledges the “green” errors he has made – the silver in his camera, the jet that brought them there – in highlighting the problems in China, and they are deep and egregious and probably unfixable, he and his filmmaker are also, in a way, continuing to contribute to the “un-greening” of the planet. Just as you and I are by blogging on this computer and reading this blog (if you so choose to do so, but remember……
(Let’s keep those numbers low so we can save the environment, shall we?)
My take: Do what you can in your own backyard and home. Buy the damn squiggly light bulbs. We did. Recycle your brown water. We do. Turn the friggin water off when you’re brushing your teeth. Try to remember, unlike Mischa Barton, to take bags to the grocery store. But don’t think for a minute that China is going to follow suit and give up their jobs and ways of feeding themselves until it’s simply too late (which, truly, it already is). If your choice was between feeding your belly when it growls or find a way to recycle that computer part, then the choice becomes as crystal clear as the Yangtze River before human beings found it. Oh, yeah – and take a look around your house and see how many things live there that were made in China. Sort of like a certain “mini-Lini” that was being talked about for a possible “business” by someone who now wants to be “green.” Take it from Kermit – it ain’t easy being green.
As a footnote, I must say this documentary is really something to see, and the music is haunting. I’d really recommend it, but it left me feeling very helpless as to what to do to solve any problems presented here. It left me feeling that what you do good (recycle, remember to take your damn bags to the grocery store, turn off the water) is offset exponentially by someone or something else. And no amount of carbon offsets you and Al Gore put together could buy could ever turn places like China, or for that matter, the world, around.
But you can help save the rainforests by visiting www.therainforestsite.com and sending Lil’ Green plants to your friends on Facebook.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the environment. I love nature, and trees and blue sky, and clean water and clean air when we can get it in Greensboro four or five months out of the year. I’m just not going to kid myself that I can save this planet a la Mischa Barton by “not forgetting” to bring used bags to the grocery store.
