Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

Koyaanisqatsi
Directed by Godfrey Reggio
Written by Ron Fricke, Michael Hoenig, Godfrey Reggio, and Alton Walpole
1982/USA
IRE Productions/Santa Fe Institute for Regional Education
Repeat viewing
#731 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
IMDb users say 8.1/10; I say 7/10

[box] It’s not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It’s that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life. — Godfrey Reggio [/box]

I have a few nits to pick with this heavy-handed message movie.

The film has no dialogue and only a brief textual note defining the title at the very end.  Yet its message could not be clearer.  It opens with beautiful scenes of natural landscapes, many of them taken with time-lapse photography to show clouds moving through.  Most of the landscapes seem to be in the American Southwest of desert and strange rock formations.  We move on to mining, industry, atom bomb tests, etc. blotting those landscapes.  From there, the film spends all of its time in cities.  There is still heavy use of time-lapse photography that emphasizes speed and crowds.  Cars, mechanization, skyscrapers, and commercialization predominate.  There is no middle ground in this story.

The filmmakers clearly intended to convince viewers that modern life is seriously out of balance and that we are headed toward our doom.  The only way this could have been made more obvious is if they had been able to reach out from the screen with a sledge hammer.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that this film had very little to do with life at all.  The natural vistas at the beginning are all strangely vacant.  Aside from a few fleeting birds, there is no trace of animal life and scarcely any plant life.  Although Reggio quotes from the Hopi language and legends, he doesn’t show any people anywhere living in harmony with nature.  Then, when he moves to the city, we get people only in crowds or, very occasionally, staring at the camera like expressionless automatons.  The subliminal message seems to be that humans are the root of this evil.  How, then, to bring life back into balance?

For me, an empty landscape barren of life is not beautiful but dead.  Although I agree that modern life is out of whack in many ways, I can’t buy into Reggio’s world view or enjoy his film much.

I saw this for the first and only previous time when it originally played in theaters.  My main memory is of being slightly bored and annoyed with the music.  This time through I thought the music was very effective but I still kept looking at the clock – something I couldn’t do in the darkened theater.

Full disclosure:  My rental DVD didn’t come in time for this review.  I watched the film on Hulu Plus.  Since it was not part of the Criterion Collection which has no ads, I was treated to interruptions about every ten minutes.  It was pretty bizarre especially the first time when I was watching night passing over the desert and out of nowhere came “Take a mouth trip!” with a giant Big Mac.  Never again.

Trailer