October 20, 2006
Manufactured Landscapes Haunts Me
By
Katherine Dodds
I saw Jennifer Baichwal's film for the first time at the Vancouver Film Festival last week. Last night it opened in Vancouver (it's been playing for several weeks in Toronto) and it will open in other Canadian cities soon. I've seen a fair amount of films lately, but the flashbacks from this "art and horror" flick have been haunting me. The visual vastness of Peter Mettler's cinematography, punctuated by Edward Burtynsky's still shots, perfectly portrays the dark soul of Walmart and its kin. Manufactured Landscapes lays bare what globalization, mass-market consumption, and techno-waste actually looks like.
And we are all implicated. The question of what is to be done? That should be haunting us too.
Like The Corporation, this film defies easy prescriptions, and I hope that it will inspire a similar passion for asking the questions that lead to action. Sadly the answers seem to take painfully long to become clear. Currently we at HelloCoolWorld are struggling to develop, finance and design "The Campaign For Corporate Harm Reduction".
This will be a long-term project, with more than one facet. What we do hope, however, is that every film or project we take on will become part of this process to link films, artworks, and other creative cultural products, to ways to take action and to organizations working on these issues. What remains critical, as always, is learning how to sustain resources, including all our own overworked activist ones. We have to find ways to support each other's experiments, and work in some fashion to connect movements, in order to use the power of the many to reduce the hegemony of mere money!
For this reason I feel one of the great projects of the current moment is in popularizing experiments in alternative economics. Otherwise the mass paradigm of consumption will consume us all. We are trying to make HelloCoolWorld one such experiment, operating as a company with a multiple bottom line and building structures for value sharing.
Back to the film...
In the editing room that is my memory I am seeing the long, long pan, (four football fields long) from the opening shot in the Chinese factory, but in my minds eye, the rows of workers reduce to the close up of the fast, fast fingers of one woman assembling components into parts. All this human energy measured in parts per hour. What else can we build?
Please join the conversations!
- Kat
PS. We've just launched our new discussion forum. Check it out.
Tag(s):
Hello Cool World,
Alternative Economics
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On June 02, 2007 at 10:17 AM Nui wrote:
For me, after the long pan, sitting uncomfortably with the images of a factory that eats up humanity recalled my first memory of affront entering a factory, when I went for a field trip in university for industrial economics.
The moment that nailed the core of the film for me was when I saw the image of how the littles pieces of electronics came together to become the iron, hanging on that factory line that looked identical to the one I use in my own house.
It's haunting because we're all implicated in this.
Katherine Dodds AKA "Kat" is the founder of Good Company Communications and HelloCoolWorld.com. Trained in renegade advertising & branding through her work with Adbusters in the '90s, Kat's early induction into the possibilities of the web-world was inspired by the term hypertext, which she immediately found comforting. She is dedicated to cause-related communication and to the development and use of tools that promote democratic processes.
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