I had an extraordinary experience last night. Thanks to TED's Chris Anderson I had the opportunity to join a group of TEDsters at the New York opening of Jennifer Baichwal's documentary, Manufactured Landscapes. The film chronicles the work of Ed Burtynsky, naturalist photographer and 2005 TED Prize winner.
Here's Burtynsky's TED Prize speech.
Yesterday, the New York Times reviewed the film, calling it, "absorbing if unsettling." I'll vouch for that on both counts.
Here's why.
Picture yourself an already conflicted 21st century consumer. You settle into your seat and Manufactured Landscapes begins with a nine-minute uninterrupted dolly shot of the interior of a huge factory (one mile long, we TEDsters learned in '05) in China, appropriately named the "Factory of the World." As the dolly rolls the viewer sees hundreds, thousands maybe, of diligent workers at their stations wordlessly creating millions of components for unknowable objects.
The effect is immediate: Nausea. Both kinds.
The physical sensation of the camera rolling and panning does a job on your inner ear while the images of the products rolling off the line similarly effects your (Sartrean) inner soul. All this crap being produced in uncountably huge quantities, all over the world, every day. All of it being moved from place to place, used, used up, forgotten, disposed, reclaimed.
Manufactured Landscapes compellingly brings its viewer face-to-face with every step of that journey at an unimaginable scale.
In one typical scene, director Baichwal slowly zooms out on a shot of Burtynsky's still life of a mound of electronic waste, egarbage. At the shot's focal point, an incongruous small pink plastic smiling face. As the camera zooms out that pink spot becomes almost lost in an enormous sea of junk, but remains visible all the same, a poignant reminder of the particular in the general, of the realities of every single piece we're putting through the daily cycle of acquire, consume, dispose.
In one of those moments a new word for this experience popped into my head: "ecoshame." We all know the feeling by now. We're likely to have it while viewing images of the consequences of our (mostly thoughtless) daily consumer lives, or maybe just walking through a Sam's Club. In the film, Burtynsky describes his own ecoshame epiphany while driving on a freeway, realizing the degree to which everything he is seeing and touching has been created by oil.
At the end of the film, we hear Burtynsky describing in a voice over the enormous energy requirements of Chinese development as the country moves from its Mao era 90-10 rural-urban mix to a planned 30-70 split by mid-century. As we see blurry images of oil wells pumping furiously, Burtynsky says that it will take, "a new way of thinking" to enable our species to survive the consequences of those changes, not only in China, but throughout the so-called developing world.
New ways of thinking, however, do not simply appear from nowhere; they are thought of by people. Visionaries. The same kinds of visionaries who imagined one-mile long factories. The same kinds of visionaries who imagined the Three Gorges Dam (the construction of which is briefly but powerfully depicted in the film). Visionaries. Shaman.
We need "ecoshaman" to help us deal with our ecoshame, to help us get beyond the denial and paralysis. Manufactured Landscapes forcefully shows us the magnitude of the problem we face. Unlike Al Gore's film, it does not pretend to solutions. Instead, it leaves the viewer slightly nauseous in the knowledge that none of the current solutions, no matter how faithfully executed, are likely to be up to the task at hand.
If all of this makes the film sound grim, it's not. In fact, one of the problems (cited by the Times and raised in last night's post-viewing Q&A) is the beauty of Burtynsky's images. He himself eschews the word, preferring the less culturally-defined "visually compelling" to "beautiful." Regardless, the film captures the artist's striking work and creates one of its own.
By all means, see this film. Then figure out how you're going to deal with the ecoshame we've all brought on ourselves.
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