Finding the Beauty in Our Ugliness

At once rhapsodic and tinted with melancholy, "Manufactured Landscapes" finds rare beauty in the widening abyss of global industrialization. The Canadian documentarian Jennifer Baichwal took a Super-16 mm crew with her on a continent-hopping journey with the photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose large-format camera measures the impact of modern manufacturing on the land and the people in places as seemingly disconnected as provincial China and Bangladesh.

Much of the film follows its subject as Mr. Burtynsky collects images for his 2006 book "Burtynsky-China" (Steidl), making tours of massive factories and recycling yards. He uses his lens both to humanize the ritual handiwork of the anonymous workers and to frame their environments in artful abstraction. The utilitarian yellow outfits worn by the employees of a sprawling factory where irons are assembled become a bold motif when they are photographed en masse. The hundreds of discarded rotary phone dials, piled onto a small hill in one Chinese province, become strangely poetic when their faded numerals cushion a small circle of children who hop onto the refuse for a portrait.

Such contrasts are inherent to fine-art photography that focuses on themes of labor, especially in underdeveloped regions where manufacturing can be done on the cheap and the human cost is easily ignored — since no one's paying much attention. The work of Sebastião Salgado is a prime example.

But Mr. Burtynsky, while acknowledging the ambiguities, also makes more of an extended talking point from them. Rather than mythologizing the workers, or demonizing the process of China's hyperactive rush to maximize economic development, he makes quiet observations that resonate with poetic irony. As Ms. Baichwal watches over his shoulder, Mr. Burtynsky photographs an elderly woman, her face drawn tight with deep wrinkles, as she sits in her yard with a mound of high-tech debris — computer circuit boards and such — that she combs for precious metals, despite the toxicity that renders local water supplies undrinkable. The woman has lived through Mao and the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Burtynsky says, and now this: a hazardous pile of e-waste?

This matter-of-fact approach makes the film more effective than an overblown polemic, especially as Mr. Burtynsky implicates himself in the cycle that he depicts. His camera stand, his camera, the silver in his film stock, all come from this process, in which raw materials are scraped out of the land — leaving violent scars — shipped to China for assemblage into commercial goods, then eventually shipped back as refuse.

Standing on the shore of a "ship-breaking beach" in Chittagong, Bangladesh, where abandoned cargo ships drift for dismantling by the local peasants, Mr. Burtynsky marvels at the sheer, bleak, majestic rot of it all. The sight of the towering ships, halfway stripped down like tree bark ravaged by beetles, is breathtaking, as if a fantastic ruin against an endless open sky.

Cinematographer Peter Mettler does a precise and elegant job of being the eye behind the eye in this rambling excursion, giving the full sense of Mr. Burtynsky's work while not merely piggybacking, which had to be difficult. Given the boilerplate nature of so many documentaries today, especially those that trade in political issues, it's refreshing to see a film that brings aesthetics into the discussion.

In one memorable scene, Mr. Burtynsky's assistant beseeches an official for permission to photograph an industrial site and encounters a standard argument: It's a dreary scene, and the images will be used to create a negative response. "But in his eyes, it will be beautiful," he promises. And beautiful it is, and much more troubling because of that.

Tonight's 8:10 p.m. screening of "Manufactured Landscapes" will feature a question-and-answer session with Ms. Baichwal and Mr. Burtynsky. Ms. Baichwal will answer questions following the 8:10 p.m. screening on Thursday and the 6:20 p.m. screening on Friday.

Through July 3 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).