Ni tout à fait film d'art ni tout à fait oeuvre militante, PAYSAGES FABRIQUÉS de Jennifer Baichwal trouve peut-être là sa force, dans le mélange de genres. On y suit le photographe canadien de renommée internationale Edward Burtynsky dans son périple en Chine, parcourant usines et paysages dévastés. (...) Avec ses longs plans-séquences, son souci pour le détail et l'ambiguïté de son propos, PAYSAGES FABRIQUÉS est en symbiose avec son sujet.

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Shot largely on location in China, the film follows Burtynsky as he plies his uniquely austere brand of eco-activism. The massively scaled photos he takes of quarries, mine tailings and dump sites don't come with pithy, what-hath-man-wrought captions, but they offer hard-to-shake evidence of the planet's slow destruction. With its impassive camera work (...) and imperceptible editing, MANUFACTURING LANDSCAPES extends Burtynsky's artistic consciousness into the cinematic arena. (...) It's a beautiful but designedly disorienting film that, unlike so many liberal agit-docs, strives to place an onus of interpretation - and responsibility - on its audience.

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A film crew follows the footsteps of acclaimed photographer Edward Burtynsky through China and Bangladesh, recapturing the images of man's often-toxic reshaping of nature (factories, ship-breaking beaches, the Three Gorges Dam) that was the theme of a recent, successful gallery show. The opening scene in MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES - the doc version of photographer Edward Burtynsky's acclaimed "China exhibit" - is one of the most memorable I've seen in years. It's a slow pan, several minutes long (...). Jennifer Baichwal's documentary is pretty much a tag-along affair, capturing the acclaimed photog at work and sharing the sense of fascination and even beauty he seems to find in images that are otherwise appalling.

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