So, I blogged while I watched. Here is the product.
I am watching the most extraordinary thing right now. This film, Manufactured Landscapes, purports to be about industrialization, to show us some kind of reality about the way humans are shaping their world, for good or for bad. It has the potential to send a great message. But instead of being turning a critical eye on what humans (and actually the Chinese) are doing to their surroundings, the photographer-subject of the film, Edward Burtynsky, participates in this gross herding of Chinese industrial workers, as if their sole reason for existence is to participate in his photographing of the man-made landscape.
First we believe we are witnessing some daily event where the managers lecture the workers about their shortcomings. But eventually it becomes clear that several hundred (thousand?) workers are being herded down the boulevard in order to allow Burtynsky to take a photograph. Is the message here that there is something monstrous about this industry that he is trying to record? Because we can hear him talking to one of the Chinese managers, and it sounds like he gets along with the monsters just fine.
This is particularly bizarre in light of the opening comments that he makes -- that it is important to look at what we are doing to nature because we are a part of nature and should understand what we are doing to ourselves.
But it seems to me that in this moment in the opening of the documentary, he shows a disregard for these workers as a part of the humanity for which he is so concerned. And in the five minutes that follow, we see a humanization of him as a white man lecturing with concern, of his white audience exploring his photographs with curiosity and concern. Then back to the workers in the factory, doing their repetitive identical work, as if they have no identity beyond wearing their yellow shirts and following the whims of whomever is in charge, be it their manager or the white photographer who wants to document their "predicament."
21 minutes down, 69 to go.
It seems to me maybe Burtynsky is more concerned with the loss of nature's aesthetic than with the vacuum of human rights in China (and all the other places that manufacture the products we use daily in the West).
Oh god, it's a TED talk. No wonder. (TED's innovative talks are all sponsored by BMW, by the way.)
I am grateful for having been exposed to these images as I sit in my bedroom, being forced to take pause and acknowledge the backs broken so that I can live the way that I do. I only wish the filmmakers had a sense of genuine empathy with their "subjects."
Now we watch as he coaxes some children to sit atop a pile of discarded aluminum so that he may photograph him. He seems to be more fascinated with the morbidity of the manufactured landscape than on the lives on which it feeds. Still, it is very stunning to see the reality that I have so often heard about.
This seems to me to be a new kind of artistic sweatshop, and I feel gross for having paid for this DVD. And I was so damn proud of paying for a DVD today, especially since it was published by the same company who produced The Corporation.
This is so North American in it's sort of liberal-but-neutral concern for the welfare of the third world while simultaneously totally freaking out about "the environment."
31 minutes into the film and we finally hear from a worker. It's good to know that they have voices and aren't just part of the landscape. Although when she pulls out notes that sound like they were written by the corporation's PR department, it's a little freaky and underinformative.
I am looking at the shipping crates and wondering if any of them are the ones that carry people.
41 minutes in. "Everything I'm doing is connected to the thing I am photographing." Half-way to the end and we finally get to the meat of the story.
I try to say thanks whenever I eat a piece of meat. Do I remember to be thankful everytime I use the fruits of intense human labour? Is thankful enough? Do I care more about the cows I eat than about the people who made the computer I am typing on? (Lenovo Thinkpad T60 == definitely Chinese-made)
I am describing what I am watching to my girlfriend, who is Chinese (Beijing-born) via Google Talk, and she is telling me about her experiences visiting sweatshops. And she writes about the photographer's herding of the workers: "yah, i agree, at the end, the chinese workers are still submitting to someone else's wishes, fulfilling another need that they don't understand."
Now on to the Three Gorges Dam, where the photographer talks about the enormity of it, but not in any serious way about the people who were forced to leave their homes, whole villages, whole histories destroyed in the name of progress. They say the dam is there in part to avoid floods and flood-damage but the flooding caused by the dam has done plenty of damage to the environment and the people who live in it. Now we see the extraordinary truth: that the people pushed off the land were forced to deconstruct the buildings of their former cities in order to make way for the dam. It looks like England or Germany after the War. But, supposedly this is a product of peaceful behaviour. What is peace then?
1 hour and 6 minutes in, and I'm watching a total, "Everyone stop what you're doing so we can record you for the white world" moment. Because recording this for the western history (photography) books is what matters, right? I feel like I have a whole new perspective on photographic journalism and how authentic integrity can go missing from that picture …
On the other hand, having complained about the angle the film takes, the images now that they exist, are important for us all to see, I think. Watch the film. The parts at the end about gentrification (if the term can be applied to something so large-scale) in Shanghai are actually well-done and properly haunting. And the images of the old lady who refused to let them have her house are stunningly beautiful and simultaneously tragic because it is obvious they are just waiting her out … But at least she is making them wait! Of course, now I'm wondering: why make this movie about China and not about the US or Canada? I guess it's easier to demonize the doings and tragedies of people perceived as "the other" than admit to our complicity in the misery of "our own."
My message to Edward Burtynsky: your excuse for not being political is WEAK. Let me clarify: PATHETIC. I think what George Orwell said about writing applies here:
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
4 comments:
I had the displeasure of visiting the towns along the Chiang Jiang before they were 'artificially' flooded to create what Chinese officials call a modern world wonder. Those towns themselves were architectural masterpieces. Slabs of concrete and rocks juxtaposed along cliffs and mountain sides. Completely self-sustained. But when I arrived, most have already fallen to tourism. Selling whatever they can to earn an extra buck before the big move. At 13, I didn't understand the devastation that would come smashing through months later. I bought a teal colored marble rolling pin and still feel guilty for not offering him more money. I'll dig up the photos, you should see them.
I've been wanting to see this film, expecting a somewhat direct (there's always some bias) documentation of factories and industrial settings in China. However, reading your post leaves me wondering how contrived his pictures are. I can see why you are disappointed that the approach to the film was very impersonal towards the workers, but I also think that perhaps the film is aiming to accentuate the quasi-mechanization of the workers due to mass production, maybe the homogeneity of the workers from afar.
On a side note, your discussion about how he neglects to look at the human side of the workers reminds me of a documentary I saw in April about a Chinese company that went to Germany to dismantle a coal coking plant and ship it back to China to use as a model for more plants. That film looked primarily at culture clash (Germans emphasizing worker safety and paperwork, while the Chinese were working around the clock and ignoring regulations). The film also included interviews with workers, who gave a wide range of views on their satisfaction with work. Surprisingly, many weren't as unhappy/miserable as say "Manufactured Landscapes" would have one think. For many of them, it's a way to earn a livelihood and support their families, which was enough to keep them from living in complete misery. Also, being in the company of each other seemed to help them pass the time.
What is your view on TED talks, by the way?
I definitely agree that there was an element of trying to show the mechanization, which is why during the opening shot (which lasts something like 10 minutes), I was thinking "this is going to be devastating in its depth." This is why I was shocked by how contrived it was. If nothing else, it is as if Burtynsky didn't trust the truth to shine through, which I think it almost certainly would have. Although, honestly, I think it was more that he wanted to capture a certain aesthetic. There is a lot of symmetry and "calm" in his photographs. None of them really look chaotic. He simply avoided dealing with that chaotic aspect of this destruction. It happens to be that the chaotic aspect, in my opinion, is where the human story really gains depth, emotionally and physically.
Anyway, I still find it weird that instead of photographing things as they were, he essentially became involved and modified the scene with his presence. It means I can only trust the verity of his documentation so much ...
As for the doc you saw, I was wondering which workers were interviewed. The Chinese ones or the German ones? It's true that I don't have any genuine sense of how Chinese workers feel, but I have spent a lot of time learning about sweatshop experiences, and it's gross that people could be reduced to being grateful for them. If the law doesn't allow American corporations treat American workers that way, why is it okay to treat workers in the third world that way? It's not. It's just that they can get away with it. I think about this every time I go to Barbados, which is my mother's home country. It's true Bajans seem happier than Americans. But I'm not sure that justifies the sometimes extraordinary poverty many of them live in. My mother's parents, who were both teachers, had to leave because otherwise the family would have starved to death ...
TED talks ... I don't think they are amazing and innovative as they would have one think. To me it's just another manifestation of people who have enough patting themselves on the back for being fantastic and part of a fantastic society. What would be truly innovative (and therefore progressive) would be an organization that challenged the status quo of everyday corporate behaviour, not just in small ways, but in large ways. Of course, even they wanted it to, that's not gonna happen since they are all BMW-happy. I also think that the TED talks target a certain class of people and makes them feel good about their place in the world. "Nevermind that all of your clothing is made in a sweatshop! Let's look at some interesting pictures or have a session of thoughtful mental masturbation!" This is the kind of message that middle- to upper-class liberals in North America need to keep their sense of guilt to a minimum.
Also, the whole documentary had me thinking about animal rights activists who are more worried about the plight of animals than about human rights and how bizarre and upsetting I find that ...
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