Drama

Koyaanisqatsi

I saw Koyaanisqatsi for the first time back in the ’80s, when I was a teenager. I remember watching the film in a now-closed arthouse theater, realizing everything I’d understood about movies — and human drama — was being upended as the film unfolded. There were no actors, no spoken dialogue; only vivid, slow-moving, expansive visual tableaus, with a mostly instrumental Philip Glass score.

Both of my parents were artists, and I’d heard Glass’ minimalist music fill our home before; those circular, hypnotic piano compositions rippling out from a vinyl record player in our living room. But I’d never experienced anything like this film, and it remains one of the most influential film experiences in my life.

The was directed by Godfrey Reggio  and released in 1982, with cinematography by Ron Fricke (who later directed Baraka and Chronos) Production took about six years, and the score itself took three. The title is a Hopi word meaning “crazy life,” or “life out of balance,” and refers to a way of life that is in turmoil — the point being, of course, that this is us.

A Native American pictogram on a Utah rock face opens the film: shadowy figures, one of whom wears a crown. This fades into a close-up of the Apollo 12 mission liftoff, which in turn dissolves into a vast desert. From this point, the film progresses into a series of natural, organic surroundings, then introduces our own impact on the environment. First, an aerial view of choppy water; then, rows of flowers on a farm. The film is divided into chapters, and “Resource” begins with a mining truck generating huge, billowing dust clouds.

Power plants, Nevada nuke detonations in the desert, and a spiderweb of powerlines follow, drawing us in to the awareness of human presence, and showing just how broken our own design of human experience has become. People do eventually appear in the movie, but they’re not so much thinking beings. They’re blurry, busy, insect-like clusters; humming and buzzing through life in a timelapse haze.

The “Microchips” chapter juxtaposes images of tiny computer chips (remember when those images were new to us?) with satellite photos of big cities (and these too, before Google Maps?). The microchips and the aerial city layouts are reflections of each other, and we are shown as captives of a chaotic, conflicted realm we have constructed for ourselves.

The film ends as it began, a long arc that reveals itself to be a circle. We return to the same melancholy prophecy with which the film began: a life out of balance is a life destined to disintegrate. The film, its score, and its message, were intended to be timeless — and they are.

An audio note: That Glass soundtrack was re-recorded and re-released in 1998, fifteen years after the film came out. It’s really wonderful music, and worth picking up on Amazon. Snip from the original New York Times review:

The range of instrumental colors is astonishing. If one particular timbre has come to characterize “Koyaanisqatsi,”
it is the dark, subterranean growl that opens and closes the score.

And an obligatory nerd note: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Langdon Winner advised Reggio throughout Koyaanisqatsi’s development. Winner is a political theorist whose work focuses on intersection of social and political issues with modern technological change.

Koyaanisqatsi became the first in a trilogy, and was produced under the auspices of director Francis Ford Coppola. The second installment, Powaqqatsi (1988, “Life in Transformation” or “Sorcerer Life”) was under the guidance of George Lucas; the third, Naqoyqatsi (2002, “War as a Way of Life”), with Steven Soderbergh.