Chinese walker

Yung Chang was 24 when he first saw the Yangtze River. It was 2002 and Chang, who grew up in Canada, had agreed to accompany his grandfather on a “farewell cruise” through China’s Three Gorges before the area is flooded by the world’s biggest dam project. The experience laid the foundations for Chang’s film Up the Yangtze, which was screened in London in March 2008 as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.

I ask Chang when he decided to make the film. “As we approached the waiting cruise ship,” he says, “there was this marching band, and the marching band played ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ – and that moment I decided to make this film.”

Chang persuaded the tour company to let him shoot a documentary on their ship, describing it as “a sort-of Gosford Park film.” It seems an unusual analogy at first. The country house in Robert Altman’s 2001 murder mystery straddles floors and social classes, while Up the Yangtze spans Asia`s largest river and puts one of the world’s most controversial engineering projects at its heart. However, the comparison is not so far off. In his careful attention to the economic dimensions of the tourist cruise down the Yangtze – and the social implications of the mega-dam project – Chang says he tried to show the viewer the “human face behind that dam”.

The principal human faces of the film are Yu Shui and Chen Boyu, two young workers on the cruise ship. Yu,16, dreams of becoming a scientist. She is the daughter of poor farmers and grew up in an illegal settlement on the banks of the Yangtze River in Fengdu, Sichuan province. Chen is an urbane 19-year-old from a wealthier background than Yu. Both teenagers reflect important aspects of the country’s youth, but with his confidence and short attention span, Chen better embodies China`s single-child “little emperor” generation. We see his struggles with the ship management and his love of karaoke. Yu, meanwhile, learns how to be a woman and a consumer in fast-developing China.

Progress, change and development are at the heart of the film, not least in the lives of its two teenage protagonists. At one point in the film, Chang’s voiceover quotes Mao Zedong`s famous 1956 poem about the dam project, which was then just a dream, but now has displaced nearly two million people:

“The mountain goddess, if she is still there;

The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose large, majestic prints focus on human construction and industrial landscapes, says he aims “not to glorify industry, nor to damn it.” But when he turned his lens to China’s rapid industrialisation, what did he find? And how can his striking images help us understand the environmental challenges facing the world’s fastest growing economy? These questions are asked subtly and artfully in Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary film directed by Jennifer Baichwal, which opened in the United Kingdom on May 9.

I meet Baichwal at the British Film Institute in London and start by asking her why she was first attracted to Burtynsky’s vast images of factory production lines, ship-breaking yards and mountains of electronic waste. “When I first saw Burtynsky’s work,” she says, “I was struck by the capacity of the pieces to change environmental consciousness non-didactically.” Baichwal, whose previous films include a portrait of the enigmatic writer Paul Bowles, says she was drawn to the images’ ambiguity and sense of mystery. “They are beautiful to look at, but you’re looking at garbage. The somersaults that your mind goes through when you’re confronting one of these prints – I think it takes you to a different place.”

This complexity stands in sharp contrast to the green politics of an earlier time, she says, politics which were often polarising and out of touch with the ethical imaginations of ordinary city dwellers. “Not everybody’s going to move to the country and become an organic farmer and make their own clothes.” Instead, Manufactured Landscapes suggests another way to begin to think about ecology. Rather than being a documentary with a didactic political message – in the style of Al Gore’s global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth – the film`s stately pace allows the viewer to “slow down enough to meditate on your own impact on the environment.”

Baichwal admits that Manufactured Landscapes reaches similar conclusions to Gore’s film, “but through a completely different path that is much more experiential, allowing you to be in the places you are responsible for, but would never see.” The film animates these hidden places in Burtynsky’s work with on-the-ground reportage, the photographer’s own words and a dissonant, industrial soundscape. At its heart is the seeming contradiction between the rapid, noisy process of industrialisation in Asia and the eerie serenity of Burtynsky`s monumental photographs.