Watermark (U.)
Directed by Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky. 92 mins.
He's an environmentally conscious Canadian photographer, she's a Canadian documentary film maker with a masters in philosophy and theology: when they get together they make slow, earnest films about the way human activity shapes the landscape, films that are almost painfully beautiful.
While Manufactured Landscapes, their previous collaboration, was shaped as a study of his work, this is an essay on the relationship between man and water. It's a globe trotting enterprise that takes in the construction of massive dams, rice growing in paddy fields and abalone fishing in China, leather production in Bangladesh, the fountains in Las Vegas, the creation of the Los Angeles aqueduct and scientists in Greenland drilling to find ice from 130,000 years ago when temperatures were 2 degrees warmer and water levels were 6 or 7 metres higher than it is today.
The credits announce that “the film was shot and edited without a traditional script” and that the ratio between shot footage and that which is in the film is 180:1. It just sticks it all randomly together, jumping about from scene to scene with no real links, though there is one moment when shots of worshipers washing away their sins in the Ganges moves seamlessly into westerners worshiping the sea on a summer's day. The film drifts casually by, flipping between moments of mesmerising visual beauty and the occasional longueur.
The film's style is like an impressionistic version of National Geographic. It occasionally uses slow motion and speeded up time lapse images, but this is much less gimmicky than the Koyaanisqatsi school. The most effective scenes are usually the aerial shots. Mostly the film lets the images speak for themselves but once or twice Burtynsky gets to talk about his work or the scientists in Greenland get to explain the significance of their research. i
Compared to Manufactured Landscape, this seems to be a more doctrinaire piece, more pointedly green. It also doesn't quite have the jaw dropping wonder of the previous work but it is powerful piece, something that does genuinely give you an insight into how the planet works.
Directed by Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky. 92 mins.
He's an environmentally conscious Canadian photographer, she's a Canadian documentary film maker with a masters in philosophy and theology: when they get together they make slow, earnest films about the way human activity shapes the landscape, films that are almost painfully beautiful.
While Manufactured Landscapes, their previous collaboration, was shaped as a study of his work, this is an essay on the relationship between man and water. It's a globe trotting enterprise that takes in the construction of massive dams, rice growing in paddy fields and abalone fishing in China, leather production in Bangladesh, the fountains in Las Vegas, the creation of the Los Angeles aqueduct and scientists in Greenland drilling to find ice from 130,000 years ago when temperatures were 2 degrees warmer and water levels were 6 or 7 metres higher than it is today.
The credits announce that “the film was shot and edited without a traditional script” and that the ratio between shot footage and that which is in the film is 180:1. It just sticks it all randomly together, jumping about from scene to scene with no real links, though there is one moment when shots of worshipers washing away their sins in the Ganges moves seamlessly into westerners worshiping the sea on a summer's day. The film drifts casually by, flipping between moments of mesmerising visual beauty and the occasional longueur.
The film's style is like an impressionistic version of National Geographic. It occasionally uses slow motion and speeded up time lapse images, but this is much less gimmicky than the Koyaanisqatsi school. The most effective scenes are usually the aerial shots. Mostly the film lets the images speak for themselves but once or twice Burtynsky gets to talk about his work or the scientists in Greenland get to explain the significance of their research. i
Compared to Manufactured Landscape, this seems to be a more doctrinaire piece, more pointedly green. It also doesn't quite have the jaw dropping wonder of the previous work but it is powerful piece, something that does genuinely give you an insight into how the planet works.
