dateline July 22, 2007, 1030pm
RE/Search views "Manufactured Landscapes"
In the Koyaanisqatsi tradition, a Canadian documentary filmmaker (Jennifer Baichwal) has produced a highly disturbing and beautiful film about the future of Planet Earth. Nobody said a word as the audience exited the theater, heads down, and we recommend you see this film with some jolly friends... but see the film, definitely. After viewing a trailer, we also recommend the forthcoming film "The Eleventh Hour" (and 59 Minutes), produced and narrated by one Leonardo Di Caprio - beautiful catastrophe images and more fodder for the upcoming "Catastrophism" theory - a work in progress. The subtitle is "Consume Less... Live More." [ for a trailer see http://wip.warnerbros.com/11thhour/ ]

"Manufactured Landscapes" features the spectacular 4x5" deep focus still images of the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky as he travels around China (also Bangladesh) documenting "industrial progress" and its consequences for the future. How would you like to work in a gigantic factory with 10,000 employees - all wearing identical yellow jackets (and blue head-scarves for women), being told to take it personally when production "mistakes" occur? How would you like to work scavenging precious metal out of discarded circuit boards and poisonous, dead computer monitors? Have you ever seen a huge strip-mining pit, a mile deep? The world's largest dam being built over a city where over a million people had to be displaced?

I doubt that J.G. Ballard would recognize most of contemporary Shanghai, the fastest-growing city in the world, where high-rises have replaced almost all of the shanty-towns which at least had "real" community (Ballard was there in the early '90s on a "Kindness of Women" press junket). Naturally, people were deceived, swindled and even killed so their handmade houses could be destroyed for new high rise developments... For some renters, eviction equals murder...

The most amazing "Terminal Beach" kind of images were filmed at Bangladesh, where the remains of ships stand like Surrealist monuments, almost like a Salvador Dali painting. And it looks like an amazingly complicated cloverleaf 3-D freeway network was filmed in an area near San Francisco - anyone know the exact location? There was also an aerial view of perhaps the world's largest new car lot, along with a brief commentary on "Peak Oil" showing oil derricks pumping away...

After being temporarily immersed in 15 minutes of global cultural infantilism - i.e., the mad fad of the Harry Potter 7 debut - it was a refreshingly, dialectically opposite experience to luxuriate in the disturbing, high-focus, gorgeously lit images of the Futureworld known as China. Something is definitely "wrong" with the contemporary philosophy - is it "Modernism"? - underpinning all the ravaging of the earth's land and the erection of the ugliest building structures ever imaginable... such ugliness ought to be totally illegal! We agree with Oscar Wilde that creating beauty is the only lasting, satisfying occupation for a conscious, creative human being ... nothing else has "staying power" - at least for those of us who still wonder about "the meaning of life." We think about this topic every day, but framed in a Monty Python context, of course ...
- V. Vale, www.researchpubs.com RE/Search / Search and Destroy founder, San Francisco