If you are planning (you should) to go see Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary "Manufactured landscapes", which opened last week in theaters across the US after spending a year mesmerizing film festivals audiences and will soon arrive in Europe, make sure you get there in time, for nothing describes the scale and essence of today's globalized industry more tellingly than the opening scene: a seven-minutes tracking shot of the floor of a boundless Chinese factory, row after row after row of disciplined workers and efficient repetition that Stanley Kubrick could have filmed.

Regarding the repetition, in one scene which observes the manual assembly of circuit breakers, I thought of Michael Haneke and the ping-pong scene from 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. (In the film, this scene runs for around seven minutes.) The opening scene of "Landscapes" brought to mind Jean-Luc Godard's Tout Va Bien, especially the closing scene, consisting of a long tracking shot along the innumerable aisles of check-out counters in a supermarket.

The film is now available on DVD. Amazon says:

Manufactured Landscapes works triple-time as a documentary portrait, a tone poem, and a work of protest.

Ed Burtynsky's beautifully monstrous 'Manufactured landscapes'