Made in China

NEW YORK -- At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, William Blake wrote of the "dark satanic mills" that had begun to choke England's verdant pastures. Two centuries later, the scale of global industry has far superseded anything Blake could have imagined.

In "Manufactured Landscapes," Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal trails photographer Edward Burtynsky , an Ontario native, on a recent trip to China as he documents the transformation of vast landscapes by some of the world's most massive industries.

Nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival , "Landscapes" is currently touring in the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival and runs at the Museum of Fine Arts through July 1 .

"We tried to re-create the macro-micro experience that you have when you're standing in front of one of [Burtynsky's] enormous still frames," Baichwal says. "It's a wide view and you're overwhelmed; then you look in closer and see garbage or people. You really have this back and forth and we tried to do that as well."

Beautiful to look at, and often horrifying to contemplate, Burtynsky's large-format prints depict oil refineries, waste dumps, mines, quarries, factories, and recycling depots in high-resolution detail. Images from the photographer's most recent book, "Burtynsky-China," were exhibited at the Barbara Krakow Gallery last fall and at Tufts University Art Gallery earlier this year. Often printed in symmetrical diptychs and shot from an elevated position, these photos, like the thought-provoking film they inspired, raise troubling questions about our relationship to the environment.

"I was overwhelmed by the complexity of the dialogue these stills raised," says Baichwal, who previously made the documentaries "Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles" (1998) and "The True Meaning of Pictures" (2002), on Appalachian photographer Shelby Lee Adams . "Not only do they let you witness the places you are responsible for but would never normally see -- the interior of those factories that make your steam iron, the recycling heap it goes to after you throw it away -- not only that, but the fact that they're so nondidactic, that they allow anybody, really, to engage in that dialogue."

Burtynsky says he strives consciously to keep his photo-narratives "flexible" and open to interpretation, partly to correct what he perceives to be a shrill and apocalyptic tone in environmentalist discourse, which makes activist voices "easy to marginalize."

"Everything has consequence, and this is about consequence," he says. "This is about the other side of our built environment or the other side of our consumer culture. There's this other world that is massive and ever-growing, and it has consequences both to the diminishment of natural resources, and to the expansion of China and the externalization of a lot of the dirty stuff that it takes to make the things we [North Americans] like."

The toilsome reality behind "Made in China" tags comes across in the film's opening scene: a mesmerizing nine-minute tracking shot of assembly-line workers at a plant the size of four football fields. Peering at the work stations of these uniformed employees, mostly migrants from the provinces lured by steady pay and dorm-like housing at the complex, one is dumbfounded by the pace and mind-numbing repetitiveness of their tasks.

"It's amazing how many stories are teeming inside this wide view," Baichwal marvels, noting how she attempted to zoom in on narratives embedded within Burtynsky's photos. "Those women -- it was devastating to watch them. It made you aware of the painstaking effort that goes into making even tiny little disposable things."

Initially, gaining access to such sensitive sites as the Three Gorges Dam and Bao Steel's coal-distribution field (the site of a minor public-relations hassle in the film) was tricky. Working with the Canadian embassy, Burtynsky made an appeal to the foreign-affairs office in China. "I said to them, I don't think anybody of my level is capturing what's happening in this country, and you are at a historic moment of transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. Images are open, and mine are in particular."

Baichwal, meanwhile, who filmed in Shanghai's urban-renewal districts without Burtynsky, had problems of her own. "For some reason, they're much more sensitive about motion-picture cameras than still cameras. Every time we turned on the camera required massive negotiations."

Baichwal says it was "surreal" to be in these recycling yards and factories, utterly devastated environments where no matter where you looked, "there was nothing natural left." Mostly, though, one is struck by the grandiose scale of everything: armies of workers, oceans of refuse, miles upon miles of skyscrapers, all humming with the promise of economic strength and revitalization. Burtynsky has a theory about that.

"If you look at the early Romantics, the Turner paintings -- a ship lost at sea, gale-force winds -- nature was an omnipresent, fearful, sublime force. We were dwarfed within that world. And then fast forward 200 years: We've created a world that buffers us from nature. But isolating ourselves from nature and having our air-conditioned cars and ships and jets -- in the urban world we've built up, we've created this industrial complex that to me is the new sublime. We are now dwarfed within that creation."

Damon Smith can be reached at damon.g.smith@gmail.com.