Koyaanisqatsi

We are but dust and grime upon the face of the earth...

When this visual opera of the senses was released, somehow I managed to miss it for all these years. Only now, have I been able to get a DVD and feast myself to one of the most mesmerizing documentaries I've seen. Now I can get to see the sequels...

In the twenty-five years since its release, nothing much has fundamentally changed. The only real difference is that the scale of life out of balance has ballooned to the point where humanity has finally realized – perhaps too late – that we are indeed on the path to self-destruction unless radical steps are taken to change our ways. Some might argue that I'm too pessimistic and point to the Montreal protocol (it set the wheels in motion to stop using CFCs that were causing the depletion of the earth's ozone layer) as proof that we can pull together when danger is imminent.

Perhaps true...but the problem is that many still don't think that life on earth – not in the upper atmosphere – is truly out of balance. This documentary takes us all back to what it was like all those years ago – and, as you will see or have seen on your TV news programs today, it's now all that much worse...

The metaphors abound, beginning with Earth, Air and Water as the three dominant and necessary conditions that permit life on this planet, then relentlessly but gradually, showing how humanity changes the very conditions that support balanced life. Mountains explode, fires consume, people increase and multiply together with the trappings humanity needs to keep consuming: traffic jams, food and automobile production, steel and glass monuments to Mammon – surely a parody of Kubrick's images of the monolithic Sentinel in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – freeways that look like arteries with blood coursing through veins, images from space that show glowing cities which morph into electronic circuits for computers – we've become the machines we've invented – and, of course, the milling millions, moving through life as though they are the walking dead, oblivious to all except the self and self-gratification.

It is at once a pretty picture and a damning one – of particular note, the sequenced implosion of the abandoned Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St Louis, designed, ironically, by the architect of the World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki.

The music very sensibly doesn't belabour the use of the title; it's chanted only during the opening sequence and during the finale which, in my opinion, is the most stunning tracking shot I've seen yet as the camera follows the detritus from an exploding rocket (a Russian one, I think) plunging back to earth. For the rest of it, just sit back, let the music waft over and through you as you watch your future begin.

This is a film that everybody should see at least once.

"It is up for the viewer to take for herself what Koyanisqaatsi means. For some people it's an environmental film, for some people it's an ode to technology, for some people it's a piece of sh-t, for other people it moves them deeply. It depends on who you ask" - Godfrey Reggio

So, Koyanisqaatsi. Boring junk to some, an involving masterpiece to others, and God knows what other adjective-noun combinations are out there (you can probably guess my opinion from the rating above). Most of these descriptions are fairly subjective, but it would definitely be wrong to regard Koyanisqaatsi as anti-cinema. It is anything but. Cinema, in its purest form, is a marriage of sound and visuals; everything else is just decoration. Dialogue? Storyline? Koyanisqaatsi harks back to an age when cinema was simply a filmed record of a situation. Was it not the Lumiere brothers who are generally regarded as the first pioneers of cinema? And is it not the case that their films comprised of nothing more than situations like a couple feeding their baby, workers leaving a factory, or the (in)famous Train Leaving A Station, which went down in folklore as causing people to flee the auditorium in panic thinking they were about to be hit by a train as it approached them on-screen? Koyanisqaatsi is cinema returning to its roots, to the days when the possibilities for film as an art form were wide open, free of commercial constraints and fickle audiences too narrow in scope to accept anything other than what they view as the given norm.

In a way it's fairly irrelevant what Koyanasqaatsi meant to me on a personal level, though I might get to that later. What's important is what Koyanasqaatsi represents. It's an interesting attempt (and a successful one in my view) to illustrate how a narrative can be created simply by editing together seemingly loosely related scenes and images. It reminds me of another cinematic milestone, the Kuleshov experiment, in which two separate images where edited together to create a third meaning, and which helped establish what is now known as Russian montage (and speaking of the Russian montage tradition, anyone who has seen Vertov's The Man With The Movie Camera will no doubt find traces of it in Koyanisqaatsi and vice versa). Koyanisqaatsi takes it one step further, perhaps even to its logical conclusion, using editing to create a new meaning for the entire narrative as a whole. It works on a gut level and sparks an emotional response, in a way it demands a response, be it boredom, amazement... it really depends on the person (as illustrated by the Reggio quote above). As such it's an example of cinema at its most subjective.

Coming back to the influence Man With A Movie Camera no doubt had on this film, I think what Godfrey Reggio has done here is take this specific style of film-making and turn it into what I, personally, view as a cinematic statement on humanity- and our technology's relationship with the environment around us. It's a pessimistic film, filled with Cold War anxiety (though it hasn't lost any of its relevance) - and in retrospect, I also found it reminiscent of an age when America still had a strong avantgarde movement in the shape of people like Reggio or Laurie Anderson (and in a way it's an interesting coincidence that 1983 also gave birth to another experimental documentary, Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, which is equally rich in scope and tackles the same philosophical issues, albeit from a slightly different angle).

I really wonder if the western world could produce a film like this today, in an age where cinema audiences are more fickle than ever, demanding a cut every three seconds and some sort of "surprise twist" at the end, with hardly a niche left for the Godrey Reggios of this world. But in a way I suppose it doesn't really matter. Koyanisqaatsi, to me at least, is one of the richest cinematic experiences anyone could possibly hope to have, and I doubt I'll see a film which will move me quite like this for a long time to come.

KOYAANISQATSI remains a profound statement over twenty years after its original release. the point then is the point now.

one of the great things about this film is that while the intrusion of man is initially presented as profane and abhorrent, ultimately there is found a symmetry to the human experience that is as organic as anything found in the `natural' world. i used to be tempted to perceive humans as the only species on the plant that didn't fit, that threw everything out of balance, as it were. but over time it has become apparent that even the blight of man on earth is a naturally occurring phenomenon. the evolution of life is the destruction of life. the circle is unbroken.

Koyaanisqatsi is a unique and thought-provoking film. It came out at about the same time as "My Dinner With Andre", another unique and thought-provoking film which used conversation as virtually the sole method of communicating. Whereas "My Dinner With Andre" consisted entirely of a conversation between two actors, and resulted in the formation of numerous local discussion groups by devotees, Koyaanisqatsi passed relatively unnoticed, perhaps because it used the opposite technique of relying only on images and music, with no dialogue whatsoever. I found both films fascinating.

The first half of Koyaanisqatsi is of a world full of beauty. The most memorable images for me are time-lapse photography of clouds and their shadows moving across the canyon-country landscapes of the desert southwest. Anyone who has spent hours gazing into a fire or watching waves at the beach will find the photography mesmerizing - one of few film experiences that convey natural beauty almost as well as the reality itself.

The second half of the film is an intentionally jarring contrast, starting with a depiction of mechanized destruction of the same beauty for human purposes, i.e. mining coal to produce electricity. The message soon becomes overwhelmingly plain: We are screwing the place up, and are immensely poorer for it. The sourpuss face of frustration and disgust on a woman vainly trying over and over again to light her cigarette with an empty lighter summed it up for me, although other viewers of any sensibility will find plenty of disturbing images from the second half of the film to identify with.

As my friends and I left the theater (sadly, this is one of those films that loses some of its impact on the small screen) one remarked "It's been done. They've made the movie I wanted to make". Some of the commentators here have basically said that, while Koyaanisqatsi is undoubtedly a very good film, they didn't like the message; one referred to people who would enjoy the movie as misanthropes.

While its opposite film, "My Dinner With Andre" was full of discussions about the unarguably wonderful meta-physical potential of sentient beings such as ourselves, and while I enjoyed it a great deal, the contrast between the two seemed to point out that we as a species really are rather full of ourselves at times. Whether one is inclined to agree, or just wishes to see a glimpse of another point of view, one cannot go wrong seeing Koyaanisqatsi. Like the Angel of Death silently pointing out to Ebaneezer Scrooge the error of his ways, this film's message IS unmistakable, and needs no words.

I first went to see this film almost by accident. Some friends were going, & it happened that Philip Glass was due to be in the cinema for an after-screening interview. I wasn't a huge fan of Philip Glass, I'd never heard of Koyaanisqatsi or Godfrey Reggio: but what the hell, I went along, expecting some sort of nicely-filmed but vaguely-boring worthy documentary.

An hour & a half later, I was - and I'm having to try very hard to find adjectives here - in fact I'm failing. It was The-Thing-That-You-Can't-Even-Tell-Someone-What-It-Is. Completely transfixed, transported, for 90 minutes of my life.

This film has no dialogue. It has no actors, apart from everyone & everything that Ron Fricke's camera touches. It has no plot, apart from just the simple, complex, unfolding story of the world.

The truth is, of all the films that people feel have really made an impact on their lives - and you only need to read through this lengthy thread to see how many of those people there are - this is one of the hardest to communicate to someone who hasn't actually seen it. You can compare it, perhaps, to things they might have seen - but there aren't that many to compare to. It has a kind of poetry on a whole different level from, for example, Man with a Movie Camera. The only things that spring to mind for me are Orphee or Last Year at Marienbad, but these are completely different kinds of movie, and even people who don't like them might be totally taken apart by Koyaanisqatsi.

Sure you could - rightly - use phrases like "breathtaking cinematography" or "unforgettable images". You could praise the music (which really opened my ears to Philip Glass). You could point out, as many have done, how the film made you look again at the world, & at your own place in it. Or you could try to relay its "environmental" message - and there are people, especially those who take any implied criticism of our species' waste and cruelty as a kind of personal insult, who will not like that message.

But none of these things would come close to capturing what makes this film so special. Like trying to explain "red" to someone who's never seen colours. You have to experience it. If possible in a cinema, sitting right down at the front, completely immersed in the screen and its images.

I know I'll never forget the first time I saw it. You might not either.