In "Watermark," as the camera closes in, we watch what looks like brown lava surging across the screen, like a sculptural frieze in motion. The camera moves back, and what seemed liked molten stone is the silt-filled water of the Xiluodu Dam in China, released to spread into a river below from the structure that's six times the size of the Hoover Dam in the U.S. Chemical pollution"The scope of it was daunting but also intriguing, and water is unbelievably cinematic as a medium," said co-director Jennifer Baichwal from Toronto, where she lives. Like his previous book (and film with Baichwal), "Manufactured Landscapes" (2006), which focused on China, their documentary scrutinizes man's shaping of his natural environment, this time in the addition and subtraction of water, mostly for farming. 'Pushing me' "I was always allowing the subject matter and what I was trying to say determine where I stand, and in the 'Water' project, it's always pushing me to be anywhere from 600 feet to a couple thousand feet in the air," said Burtynsky. Technology, Edward Burtynsky explained, enabled "Watermark" to observe water's effects on the grandest scale - even in China, where the military controls all access to the air. Cinematic in the 70 mm wide-screen tradition and elegant by documentary standards, is "Watermark" too beautiful for the ecological crises that it depicts? The veneer of the aesthetic, of the light, of the composition, of the color, of the scale - all those things are tools that I'm engaging to make an image, something that one will behold and ponder and consider, he said.
Reported by SFGate 3 minutes ago.
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