![]() ![]() That said, Burtynsky’s team includes Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier and, arguably, their contribution to the films serves to humanize both the photographer and his subjects. It’s a form of documentary filmmaking usually marked by egos as big as the landscape they depict and a dearth of self-reflection (for more on this, see my article on the work of Bertrand). ![]() When they appear at all, these filmmakers are positioned as flying solo they don’t tend to combine their work with that of environmental activists no matter how much concern they may register for the plight of the world. This would make Burtynsky into a Canadian, modernist version of David Attenborough, Yann Arthus-Bertrand ( Human, Earth from Above) or Ron Fricke ( Samsara), concerned white men all, effortlessly travelling the world armed with the latest high-tech equipment in a modern-day version of adventure or mondo filmmaking. From their sublime aesthetics to their clouded politics, the Baichwal-Burtynsky trilogy can be put in relation to the popular global documentary genre that took to the air with Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1983) almost four decades ago and has become ensconced into flyover rides and planetary nature series such as Our Planet and Planet Earth. ![]() It doesn’t constitute an excuse but, as Frederic Jameson observed three decades ago, finding ways to visually represent the global capitalist system that might adequately illuminate the devastation it has wrought is as difficult as it is necessary. Critics charge him with failing to acknowledge the politics behind the devastation. Often people appear as tiny, inscrutable details engulfed in massive landscapes. But the scale at which he works risks becoming so large that any human or political link to the world it depicts becomes overly-attenuated. Burtynsky’s use of the aerial view in order to create often gorgeous images that reference modernist abstraction has led to significant success in the global art world. His work tends toward what Clint Burnham has called a “gentrification of the sublime” managing to find a pleasing beauty and order in the environmental devastation he depicts, often from afar (the literal meaning of sublime is, in fact, aloft). Whether enormous, smoke-billowing bonfires of elephant tusks seized from poachers in Nairobi, a backhoe struggling in a danse macabre with a huge slab of Carrera marble in Italy, or flyovers of perfectly circular lithium evaporation fields in Chile’s Atacama desert, the filmmakers have scoured the globe to find unique and compelling images of humans extracting and violently exploiting the planet’s resources.īurtynsky, now 64, has spent decades making large-scale aerial photographs of altered landscapes, from the tar sands of Alberta to the oil derricks of Texas and the ship-breaking beaches of Bangladesh. ![]() Like the other films in the trilogy, Anthropocene inhabits a position of fascinated horror when faced with the scale of human-produced geological changes to the global landscape through extraction, terraforming, intensive urbanization, and industrial agriculture. Beginning with Manufactured Landscapes (2006), an exploration of Chinese industrialization, and continuing with Watermark (2013), an investigation into the exploitation of water in contemporary societies, the latest installment uses a narrator (Alicia Vikander) and intertitles where the others did not, presumably in an attempt to bring a more explicitly interpretive and critical frame to the epic topic. Referencing the current prominence of this theme doesn’t necessarily lend much clarity to their project, but it does raise a number of compelling issues about how to best represent the current emergency. “Environmentalism from the Sky?” Zoë Druick (Simon Fraser University)Īnthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018) crystallizes an environmental theme latent in Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky’s earlier films about large scale human interventions into the natural world produced over the last dozen years. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |