Mike McCahill 

Watermark review – a critical eye on the way water shapes our world

Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary uses thrilling helicopter shots to explore how we use our most precious resource, writes Mike McCahill
  
  

Watermark
An aerial shot of Icelandic waters, from Jennifer Baichwal and ­Edward Burtynsky’s Watermark. Photograph: Ed Burtynsky Photograph: Ed Burtynsky/PR

Documentarist Jennifer Baichwal first collaborated with photographer Edward Burtynsky on 2006’s stunning Manufactured Landscapes, which illustrated the visual impact of industrialisation on the Earth’s surface. Here, they’ve turned to the myriad ways water shapes our landscape, and is shaped in turn by man. We approach fountains, stepwells and hydroelectric dams from a helicopter overview that is at times purely thrilling – pulling up from touching distance of the waves to reveal the sprawl of a Chinese seaweed farm – but most often it’s with a critical eye; each fly-by offering pointed observations on what we’re doing with our most precious resource. Cutting between parched mosaics of Mexican soil and California’s artificially maintained greenery makes a subtle point; if water is, as so much dystopian sci-fi predicts, one faultline along which society may rupture, then the cracks are already in evidence. It’s not as focused as its predecessor, but its best sequences rehydrate the mind.

 

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