Difficult Films: 'Koyaanisqatsi'

I mentioned Luddite films in the previous blog.  One film at the top of any list has to be Koyaanisqatsi (1983).  Not only is its message singular in describing the effects of technological industrialism, the power of the film derives from the complete absence of a verbal narrative.

This makes it by any standard a very difficult film.  Not because we cannot understand its meaning.  Just the opposite.  Rather, the experience of watching the film can wear down an audience.

We are thrown into the film with virtually no assistance.  Alert viewers will pay attention closely as possible to a film that it knows will be difficult, yet Koyaanisqatsi comes unrelentingly for 85 minutes.  There are respites and changes of pace, but it’s a heavy burden to take on.

This very burden soon develops, if one stays with the film, into an intensely gratifying experience.  You will want to see it again and again.  Not that you would want all films to be like Koyaanisqatsi.  Its director, Godfrery Reggio, made two later “qatsi” films, Powoqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002), and thus far I have not been able to watch either of them through the end. 

One's gratification, in no small part, comes from listening to Philip Glass’s score.  Reggio has said that he re-edited the film to conform to the rhythms of the music.  It’s impossible to think about Koyaanisqatsi without the music.  The one other film I know that was made to its music is Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938), whence the director waited for the music before filming a scene.  Sergei Prokofiev composed one of the greatest film scores, and it has often become part of many orchestras' repertoires. 

Alexander Nevsky is a potent anti-German, pro-communist work of propaganda, yet its didacticism is blunted by the rousing nationalistic music and lyrics.  Glass’s music, likewise, soothes Reggio’s didacticism while simultaneously involving us more deeply in the marvelous imagery.  The union of cinematography and music never has seemed more complete.

Despite the depicting the relentless destruction and remaking of the natural landscape, Reggio is not oblivious to the unnatural beauty of the modern industrial world.  Romantic poets like Wordsworth were in awe of man-made achievements, noting their massive scale and beauty against the natural landscape.  At several points, we must marvel at some of the film’s sequences.

The first is the close-up of an Apollo rocket blasting off.  We are taken amidst the fire and thrust of the ship in the first moments of take off.  Reggio films it in slow motion.  At first, we can’t see what it is.  After a few minutes, we realize that we are witnessing one of the greatest shows of Man’s technological prowess and power.  The sheer might of getting the rocket and its crew off the pad and into the atmosphere toward outer space seems unworldly, a messing with the gift given to us by the Greek god Prometheus.

The second is the called the Grid.  Time-lapse photography of traffic at night in a city creates a network of horizontal and vertical lines of light.  Reggio shows with this inspired perspective an unconscious beauty contained in man-made objects.  This unnatural beauty recalls an earlier segment of the film when he films landscapes in the Arizona desert in Monument Valley describing the Earth’s natural beauty.

Koyaanisqatsi can be viewed as paean to technology and mankind’s fabulous achievements.  Reggio himself (in Essence of Life, an extra on the DVD) prefers to see this content as the “beauty of the beast.”

He also mentions that he would have preferred that the film had no title.  Language has become a monstrosity that is senseless, meaningless.  His images without words encompasses the indescribable state of the modern world.  But, finally, he gave in and gave his work a title.  At film’s end, he gives us four meanings of "Koyaanisqatsi":

    1. Crazy life
    2. Life in turmoil
    3. A state of life that calls for another way of living
    4. Life out of balance

Many scenes of crowds crossing intersections in cities and closeups of faces on the street support the third definition.  Reggio also shows assembly workers making baloney, sausage and Twinkies.  The faces of the pedestrians and workers appear worry and exhausted.  One wonders how much longer our civilization can sustain its present rates of growth. 

In fact, our ability to dwell on the film’s images and comprehend what we are seeing, even interpreting any which way, is facilitated by Glass’s score.  He mentions in the Essence of Life commentary that he wanted to create a space between the audience and what it is seeing in the film.  He contrasts his method to the way television soundtracks for shows and commercials, as well as for movies, thrust the viewers into the content giving us little time to contemplate what we are watching. This is another way Koyaanisqatsi avoids trapping itself in its own message.

Ultimately, one comes away from the film contemplating how Reggio could render so beautifully a very personal and bleak assessment of our world.  The joyful wisdom of his art combats the consumer culture that rides of the back of a powerful technological system.