Review of Manufactured Landscapes (2006) by Ioanna Z — 26 Sep 2007

The film, as the ambiguous title suggests, unsettles many binaries like the distinctions between man/nature, country/city, manufacture/industry, etc. Industrial facilities incorporate on their premises whole cycles of production, while masses of workers perform repetitive tasks with scary precision and persistence that strangely invoke the work of craftsmen.

The abundance and low cost of labor turn manufacturing not a thing of the past, but rather a new approach to production, where all cities, dams, ships are being transformed, assembled and disassembled through the sheer power of menial labor.

I was puzzled by the director's commentary until I saw more into the film: it is difficult not to respect what is seen on the screen and not to feel something of that subliminal awe associated with mind-stunning landscapes.

Only here these mountains of scrap, coal, and debris have become an inhospitable but very real form of a human habitat. One of the factory signs reads "Factory of the World," and indeed, the film creates the visual impression that these factories make all the flat irons in the world, in the same way that the junkyards shown come to host so much of the metal scrap and e-waste coming from abroad.

The photography produces strange, uncanny effects where the industrial landscapes invoke modernist art, and the scenes of breaking and scavenging (!) of huge cargo ships remind one of all the looming giants figures in Dali.

In an age that we habitually call post-industrial, virtual, or service-oriented, Manufactured Landscapes is a wake-up call. There is an utopian undercurrent of otherworldliness (that comes close to K.

S. Robinson's Red Mars), and I could not help thinking that these people are building and remolding an industrial base for some other, completely different world.