Documenting the business of pollution

Al Gore recently endorsed Jennifer Baichwal's provocative new Canadian documentary, "Manufactured Landscapes," which plays like a companion piece to Gore's Oscar-winning global-warming warning, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Both movies question the sustainability of planet-polluting business practices, and both use shocking images to drive home the point. Gore is the narrator-lecturer of "Truth"; photographer Edward Burtynsky performs a similar function in "Landscapes."

"In some ways [Gore's movie] is the exact opposite of our film, but it comes to a similar conclusion," said Baichwal, when she brought "Manufactured Landscapes" to the Seattle International Film Festival last month. It opened Friday at the Varsity.

"Our film tries to be completely nondidactic. It's experiential; it really is about letting you be in these places, and more or less come to your own conclusions — which is what Ed's photographs do. Whereas Gore presents this impassioned argument. His film is very powerful because of his passion."

While she believes Gore is "almost single-handedly responsible for raising awareness about the environmental perils that we're facing," Baichwal and Burtynsky use a different approach. The movie includes images of industrial waste, some from Bangladesh and Canada, that are sometimes jarringly beautiful.

A spectacularly long tracking shot, photographed on a golf cart inside a Chinese factory, opens the film. While piles of cardboard boxes float by, assembly-line workers put together what appear to be fans, blenders and computers. Occasionally a worker will look up and stare at the camera, but for the most part they're absorbed by their work.

"We were in this factory, and we were walking around, trying to figure out how we were going to convey the scale of the place," she said. "So we used a golf cart, which is how they get around in these factories. We did it about five times. It took a day."

When it was finished, she decided that this had to be the opening shot of the film: "It sort of slows your heart rate down. You adjust to the rhythm of the film in that nine minutes. Also, it saturates you in that world. It gets boring, it's excruciating, because you think when is this going to end? And then you come out on the other side of boredom, into a realization of scale. It's the process you go through."

Burtynsky's 2003 book of photographs, "Manufactured Landscapes," provided Baichwal's movie with a title and a theme, but this is not strictly a film adaptation. Much of the picture was shot in China, where Burtynsky, Baichwal and cinematographer Peter Mettler were required to satisfy officials who rarely let them off their leash.

"It was very complicated," she said. "We had to get a journalist's visa, and that meant we had to have a minder with us at all times. We had to negotiate every time we turned the cameras on. Interestingly enough, they weren't worried by the stills but motion-picture footage for some reason because it's a record of reality in time."

Last year, Burtynsky published "Burtynsky: China," a book drawn from the pictures he took during the filming. When he speaks in the film, the material is taken from a speech he made at a Monterey conference on technology and design.

"Ed, in many ways, is the author of everything in the film rather than the subject — we never wanted to do a biography," she said. Burtynsky is now involved in an upcoming PBS series, "Meet the Greens," aimed at young people. One of his goals is to make an IMAX film with an environmental theme, but for the moment that appears to be too expensive.

"Nobody expected our film to be as successful as it has been; it's a fairly meditative film," said Baichwal, whose previous documentaries ("The Life of Paul Bowles," "The Holier It Gets") never enjoyed the popularity of this one.

"I think the impact it has had is a testament to the photographs, and how strong they are," she said. "I'm amazed by Ed's capacity to awaken a dialogue about your own impact on the planet. I think the power of the photographs lies in their ambiguity."

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com