Movie: Manufactured Landscapes

While we’re on the subject of great Maker-movies, I feel obliged to mention Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Manufactured Landscapes, which is a survey of the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose métier is finding beauty in the midst of environments radically altered by human activity. If you watch no further than the first shot, you will have seen one of the most amazing takes I’ve ever seen in any movie, ever: It’s an eight minute tracking shot of a Chinese factory floor that just goes on and on and on, and you keep thinking “This place can’t be that big; this shot has to end soon.” And it doesn’t. And the images of the ship-breaking beach at Chittagong, Bangladesh, are like something out of a post-apocalyptic video game: Beautiful and frightening.