Film Review Corner

Last night we went to see Edward Burtynsky's film Manufactured Landscapes. We originally wanted to see it's screening in Vancouver around this time last year, but missed it for some reason which is completely forgotten now. When we saw it advertised at the Film Huis in The Hague, we were both surprised and excited for the opportunity to see it on the big screen. So we marked it down on the calendar and counted down the days.

For those of you that are not familiar with Edward Burtynsky's work, you should be. He is an enormously important Canadian photographer that documents the incomprehensible physical impact humans have made on this earth. He seeks out massive quarries, mines, ships, mine tailings, etc. and manages to capture the scale of human extraction of natural resources. His photos are incredible, uncomfortable, beautiful and disturbing.

Manufactured Landscapes documents a period of time he was in China, producing a famous series appropriately called "The China Series." After years of photographing the extraction of raw materials in the Western world, Burtynsky headed East into manufacturing plants where many of the raw materials are turned into the stuff we buy, in factories as subliminally large as their source.

It was very interesting, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone if you get the chance. But we learned something about twenty minutes in to the film. If you're in a theatre in The Netherlands, and there's dialogue in another language – in this case, Chinese – the subtitles are not in English. Obviously, they're in Dutch. We missed about one-third of the dialogue in the film, but we got the gist, I think. (Thankfully the whole movie wasn't dubbed!)

Also worth mentioning, we tried to watch this film last week but when we got to the Film Huis all the tickets were sold out. (We thought this was really impressive, but as we learned last night it's actually because the theatre only had about 30 – 40 seats in it.) So, we decided to watch a different flick, Control by Anton Corbijn. It's a black & white documentary about the rise and fall of Joy Division's tragic-genius of a lead singer, Ian Curtis. This story was good, the music was awesome, and every second of the movie was like the most beautiful photograph you've ever seen. It is very highly recommended.

They both were. Check 'em out!