SummaryManufactured Landscapes begins as a portrait of acclaimed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who specializes in large-scale images of vast industrial landscapes. It quickly develops into a meditation on the human and environmental costs of the permanent and profound changes our planet is experiencing. Focusing on Burtynsky's images of China ... Read More
Directed By:Jennifer Baichwal
Written By:Lucas Lackner
Manufactured Landscapes
Metascore
Generally Favorable
79
User score
Mixed or Average
4.9
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Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
79
94% Positive
15 Reviews
15 Reviews
6% Mixed
1 Review
1 Review
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
100
Leaves its audience with many troubling questions. Among them: Should a film console us with its own brilliance when it aims to discomfit us with its content?
100
Jennifer Baichwal's gorgeous documentary Manufactured Landscapes amplifies the powerful work of Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian artist who specializes in large-scale photographs of terrain transformed by civilization into rivers and tides of industrial ugliness.
80
Manufactured Landscapes makes an inelegant point elegantly. The point: Humanity is altering the landscape drastically and by implication irrevocably.
75
Burtynsky doesn't preach. He's content to let viewers make up their own minds from his eye-opening and eye-pleasing images.
70
Absorbing if unsettling documentary.
67
Baichwal is comfortable with those moral and aesthetic ambiguities as well, and, as a result, she’s created a visual poem of devastation that makes one question one’s entire relationship to the world.
50
Feels constrained and rather dutiful, no matter how passionate these people are about what they're observing.
User score
Mixed or Average
4.9
44% Positive
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
11% Mixed
1 Rating
1 Rating
44% Negative
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
Mar 31, 2011
2
Equivalent to staring at a wall for it's running time. What could have been an interesting documentary on Burtynsky's art comes off as pretentious and unnecessary. It all amounts to a big "so what" when it should and could have been so much more.
Production Company:
- Foundry Films
- Mercury Films
- National Film Board of Canada (NFB)
Release Date:Jun 20, 2007
Duration:1 h 20 m
Awards
Cinema Eye Honors Awards, US
• 3 Nominations
Toronto Film Critics Association Awards
• 2 Wins & 2 Nominations
RiverRun International Film Festival
• 1 Win & 1 Nomination
