Landscapes of Globalization
December 22, 2007
It used to be common to worry that children have no idea where their food came from. Milk comes in cartons; meat in styrofoam packages. Today this worry could be extended way beyond food: where does anything in the aisles of a Target or Wal-Mart come from? Who makes the little electric fans we use in the summer? Who puts together a computer? Many of these items are more mysterious today than they were even a couple of decades ago. Our world is growing more mysterious.
The value of Manufactured Landscapes is its relatively non-judgmental gaze at the point of origin for much of what we encounter in our daily life. Perhaps the most eloquent scene in the documentary is of a woman assembling from perhaps 50 small plastic and metal parts some small powerbreaker. You can close your eyes and imagine it selling for a few dollars in Wal Mart.. and there right before your eyes are all the small parts coming together. Likewise in the long assembly lines evident in the opening tracking shot we can imagine all manner of gadgets getting put together through multiple assembly lines. By means of such scenes Manufactured Landscapes becomes necessary viewing for anyone who wants to understand our everyday world.
Beyond the giant assembly plants we are taken to the places where the detritus of our global civilization.. used computers and useless ships.. are gathered and taken apart. We see the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and the voracious expansion of Shanghai. All of this takes labor.. and we see young Chinese men and women doing their jobs and staring into the camera. They reminded me of photos of American laborers and factories from years ago.. only now on a scale that is grander than anything imaginable back then. At some point the narrator points out that this entire system is dependent on cheap energy.. and hints that maybe this is the last great stand of the era of cheap energy.
It is never possible to pass a harsh judgment on what is going on in China (or Bangladesh, where we stop briefly). The photographer Edward Burtynsky points out how even his own artistic project is dependent on this same globalized mass-industrial world. To re-imagine all this would mean to re-imagine his own work too. Coal burning plants and environmental damage in China can hardly be critiqued by America either.. since this is the landscape that we create, far away from our shores, every day with our own choices. Old Roads is dedicated to locating the values and ideas that will enable us to someday collectively make another choice. But if you want to look straight into a mirror as to who we are today, then this is the film you need to see.
