Manufactured Landscapes
     by director Jennifer Baichwal

A number of years ago, I went to a friend’s house for a birthday dinner. On my way to the kitchen to get a drink, I was confronted by a large, framed picture—new since the last time I’d been over—hanging in the hall.

“ When did you get this?”

“ We just bought it. What do you think?”

I didn’t answer. It was huge: four by five feet. It was like an abstract painting—swirls of deep colour, extraordinary detail, sumptuous, rich, almost intoxicating. It was scale-less, so slightly disorienting: a frame either massive or miniature. It took a bit longer to recognize that it was a photograph. And then a bit longer to recognize what it was a photograph of.

Densified oil filters.

I recoiled. The aesthetically seductive experience of form and colour I had been lulled into was abruptly supplanted by the knowledge that I was looking at garbage. And after that realization, this one: not just any garbage. My garbage.

I thought about the car I had driven to my friend’s house, and my left-at-home bicycle. I thought about what I had brought to contribute to the dinner: salad greens, refrigerated immediately after picking and maintained at the same temperature throughout the 3,000 mile journey from the “farm” in California to my grocery store in mid-winter Toronto. I looked around at the house: large, incandescently well-lit, warm from the furnace lumbering in the basement, protecting us from the snowy chill outside. Then the funny plastic party favours on the table: made and packaged in China, transported halfway across the world, which would be thrown away when the party was over, whatever “away” meant. Perhaps landfill. Or perhaps shipped back to China, to a plastics recycling yard, to be laboriously sorted, treated and eventually re-manufactured into another party favour to be packaged and shipped halfway across the world, bought from a dollar store and thrown “away” within hours of purchase…

There is no easy answer to the question of how to live on the planet without destroying it. You begin with the apparent innocence of attending a friend’s birthday party. Then comes the crushing awareness of your implication in obscene cycles, drenched with oil, of consumption and waste. Next comes an attempt to solve the problem neatly and finally—by moving to the country, for example, to make your own clothes and become a small-scale, organic vegetable grower! Then comes the realization that this is hopelessly idealistic, and that even if you could purify yourself with such an act, it is not a reasonable alternative for the four million other people who live in your city. After this comes inertia and despair…

And then, eventually, comes the recognition that all gestures—even small gestures—are meaningful, and that boycotting California salad mix in Toronto and not driving every-where is a start.

All this, from one picture: Densified Oil Filters No. 1.

It was the first time I encountered the work of Edward Burtynsky. And something about the dialectic of this formally beautiful frame and what it showed immediately engaged me in a complex and ongoing dialogue about how to live in the world. My consciousness was changed: not by didactic argument, not by radical ultimatums, but simply by witnessing. Burtynsky’s photographs allow us to witness the things we are responsible for but never normally get to see. That is why I wanted to make a documentary about them: to extend the experience of witnessing into the medium of film. I hope that in Manufactured Landscapes we have managed to do that.