Top 25 Favourite Films: #15 Koyaanisqatsi (Dir. Godfrey Reggio, 1982)
#15.Koyaanisqatsi. Directed by Godfrey Reggio, 1982
Koyannisqatsi is, put simply, a film about humanity, both the wonders we have created, and the damage we have wrought to the planet, from the spectacular-the launch of Apollo to building demolitions and military superpowers showing off hardware, to the mundane-the grind of daily life, channel hopping, the sweatshops in which the ephemera of our lifestyles are crafted, and so on. Moreover, with its title, roughly translating from Hopi as Life out of Balance, it is a film about how mankind increasingly uses technology, and through technology, have lost touch with the world around us, as prescient a theme now as it was nearly forty years ago.
But, far from being a documentary in the vein of Al Gore's well-meaning if polemic An Inconvenient Truth (in which the ex-Vice President nobly turns to the threat of climate change less than a decade after the US refused to sign the landmark Kyoto Protocols), or a narrative documentary in the style of Michael Moore et al, Koyannisqatsi's approach is both far more cinematic, and far more experimental. This is a film that essentially set the benchmark, not only for documentary making and experimental film, bringing multiple styles originally formulated in the world of advertising, from slow-motion to time-lapse, not to mention visually ambitious long-shots, aerial footage and other methods of filming, but in mainstream cinema, where its innovations can be seen in countless Hollywood blockbusters and more artistic films.
The film begins with two of the most important elements. The first is Francis Ford Coppola's production credit, with the veteran director essentially responsible for bringing the film to fruition, and from cinematic concept piece in which Reggio and his crew, including the instrumental cinematographer Ron Fricke essentially carried out a number of visual and cinematographic experiments that would then be edited into a narrative, to a released and completed film. The second, and arguably more instrumental element arrives as the film's red on black title begins to bleed downward. Without Philip Glass's score, this film is nothing. Whilst, divorced from Reggio's imagery, Glass's synth and vocal-dominated score has practically become a shorthand for ominous and positively apocalyptic, most notably in the mainstream in Zack Synder's so-so adaption of Watchmen, when combined with the imagery, whether it be slow motion, timelapse, or any matter of human activity, event or creation, it is flawless, a tone poem in which visual and audio are perfectly in sync.
The film begins slowly, with Hopi rock glyphs accompanying Glass's title track, then with the spectacular launch of a Saturn V, before slow pans over rocky landscapes, punctuated with drifting but insistent synth notes, and beautifully shot visuals of the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, of nature in harsh beauty, eventually give way to other shots of the natural world, from waves to volcanic vents to a beautifully shot locked off camera angle of a cave entrance. Glass's score changes, grows dark and almost omnious, with his classic trope of arpeggios, which practically act as a musical shorthand for the encroaching movement of technology in Koyannisqatsi beginning to enter the score and from this, we get a number of the film's trademark high-speed cloud shots, largely shot by master of timelapse photography, Louie Schwartzberg. It is a beautifully edited sequence, showing the power or the planet, neatly intercutting crashing waves and high-speed cloud movement, till the two become almost indistinguishable.
It is only seventeen minutes, as Glass's score leans into its first true arpeggio run alongside a uncut and impressive aerial shot coasting along a river, in that we get a shot, of thousands of tulips being grown, huge sheets of colour flying past the camera, and the first-and surprisingly stark-shot of mankind's impact upon the world, of a half submerged rock valley, like the one in previous sequences, caused by the artifical Lake Powell. Humanity has arrived in the picture, and life is already out of balance, Glass's score swelling to emphasise this. In rapid succession, we get quary detonations, a colossal dump truck among choking coal dust, a long panshot that shows us a conveyor belt across a vast stretch of countryside, power lines, almost abstracted against each other, power stations, dams and oil derricks. The visual language, as Glass's score gathers pace, as the visuals become more violent, concluding with searing footage of atomic bomb tests, is simple. Humanity's acceleration in technology has damaged this world.
And then the film cuts, and for the first time we see people, on a beach, in front of the hulking form of a powerstation, in crowds, followed by two extraordinary long shots, first of clouds reflected on a building, then a plane, appearing, almost akin to Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia, out of the heat haze, the film's longest, and certainly one of its most spectacular, shots before turning to taxi down a runway as another appears in the foreground, eventually taking up the entire frame before it too disappears out of sight. Road shots follow, some stationary, some aerial, all of them showing the flow of hundreds, if not thousands of vehicles, humans again faceless. Following, as Glass once again gathers tempo a dizzying shot of a carpark that reduces cars down to simple blobs of colour, and thousands of massed Soviet tanks, and eventually military aircraft, bombs, missiles and once again, NASA rockets, before with a truly colossal set of explosions...the film cuts to its next sequence.
This largely concerns itself with the built environment, from the glittering skyscrapers of Manhatten to derelict apartment blocks, undercut with one of Glass's iconic pieces, the string led Pruit Igoe, as shots of dirty and messy streets, of the poorest in society, of the wreckage of Chernobyl's nearby cities gives way to brass and a long tracking shot over decayed and derelict housing projects, eventually leading to the spectacular destruction of Pruit Igoe itself. More cloudscapes follow, this time almost entirely blocked out by buildings, after which a truly jawdroping shot of huge numbers of people queueing gives way to more shots of vast crowds walking past camera, billboards and advertising almost omnipresent in the background. Glass's score is little more than a mournful drone here, with the film now shooting individual subjects, including a fighter pilot and a party of women outside a casino, in almost uncomfortably long shots.
And then comes what in short, is the film's masterpiece. The Grid is the perfect marriage of score and visual, intertwined so perfectly that it's impossible to view one without the other. The sequence is practically the film in miniature, slow painterly shots giving way to the rapid-cut, timelapse sped activity of man and his world, with an astonishing number of shots in which cars and vehicles teem past like scores of ants. Reggio again and again approaches this theme, as Glass's arpeggios flurry back and forth to moving traffic, the speed of vehicles ever increasing, till they are almost white and red blurs against the night of the city, or vast rippling waves of almost abstract moment. A shot in a station takes us in first at long range, then till we can see individual people, before a dizzying shot from crowd level disorientates us again. This is the pace of human existence, the pace of human change, of human technology, abstracted from the world.
Sequences of machinery, of things being made and done, from hot dog packing to jeans making to letter sorted, all assisted by, sped up by, technology, take the place of the teeming movement of vehicles, though the action is almost identical, almost abstract blurs of object and action. It never lets up, never falters, the camera at once passive observer and documentor, as arcade games and bowling and cinema and leisure become the theme, all shot at rapid pace-we are, it says simply, forced to live our lives at this pace, to eat and consume and enjoy ourself at a hyper-accelerated rate, aided and abetted by technology.
An astonishing series of shots of car-building follows, with increasing mechanisation, and shots of circuitboards that, of course, bear a striking resemblance to the cities a tthe beginning of the sequence follow, thematically linking back and forth to itself, the grid of the American city giving way to the grid of the circuitboard, and the circuitboard only heightening the city, reciprocating back and forth, till indistingishable. Vantage shots from cars, crowds, shots of cars follow, the pace by now frenetic, almost headache inducing, life at an unbearable speed, as shots of screens, of the worlds of advertising and television and videogames, of television in hyperlapse, a practical blur of images...finally gives way to slow motion shots of people in a casino, the closest the film ever gets to portaiture, till the sequence almost collapses visually into a visual explosion, like 2001's Star Gate on fast-forward, till it is simply light and movement.
And it finally gives way, and collapses into a slow drifting shot over a cityscape, the imagery almost abstract, cellular in shots from thousands of feet up, and Reggio finally, simply shows us computer motherboards, not practically indistinguishable from the grids in which we live in. It's...a surprisingly harrowing sequence, score little more than a drone at first, before slow notes and much slower pace begin to unfurl a series of images, almost entirely at normal speed, and at street level, of, well, us, as a species,from people waiting for lifts, to trains and trams, to portraiture in locked off shots.
And this culminates in the film's final, jawdropping moment, a moment of utter failure, in which a rocket explodes seconds after takeoff. With Glass's score, it's practically elegiac, the greatest achievement of humankind blowing itself apart on screen, to leave simply a tumbling object, falling end over end, on fire, an Icarus straying too close to the sun and, for all his wings, for all his technology, plummeting to earth. The film ends with Hopi prophecies, only compounding the film's message of us living outside our means, and indeed destructively, and cuts to black.
Koyannisqatsi is a masterpiece, not only in its impact upon how films were made-one only needs to look at modern cinema, and even modern advertising and documentary work to see its impact-but in its tone and aim. If it felt like a warning in 1982, it feels like a stark lesson we have not learnt now, in a world sped up even more by the World Wide Web, and social media, in which we are still living out of balance with the world around us. It is a film that everyone needs to see once, if only to realise this, as Reggio would expand upon both themes in the rest of the Qatsi Trilogy.
But moreover, Koyannisqatsi, as pure tone poem, as pure cinema, is a film about how mankind, for better or ill, have remade the world in their own image, how they have made cities vast metropolises of grids, made everything convenient and mechanised,and have polluted and reshaped and changed the world around themselves, and even escaped the confines of this little blue ball, into outer space in our single greatest achievement. Koyannisqatsi is a film about man and technology, and the impact of both on each other, and on the world around them. It is, in the most sweeping way possible, a film about us, at our best and worst.
But, far from being a documentary in the vein of Al Gore's well-meaning if polemic An Inconvenient Truth (in which the ex-Vice President nobly turns to the threat of climate change less than a decade after the US refused to sign the landmark Kyoto Protocols), or a narrative documentary in the style of Michael Moore et al, Koyannisqatsi's approach is both far more cinematic, and far more experimental. This is a film that essentially set the benchmark, not only for documentary making and experimental film, bringing multiple styles originally formulated in the world of advertising, from slow-motion to time-lapse, not to mention visually ambitious long-shots, aerial footage and other methods of filming, but in mainstream cinema, where its innovations can be seen in countless Hollywood blockbusters and more artistic films.
The film begins with two of the most important elements. The first is Francis Ford Coppola's production credit, with the veteran director essentially responsible for bringing the film to fruition, and from cinematic concept piece in which Reggio and his crew, including the instrumental cinematographer Ron Fricke essentially carried out a number of visual and cinematographic experiments that would then be edited into a narrative, to a released and completed film. The second, and arguably more instrumental element arrives as the film's red on black title begins to bleed downward. Without Philip Glass's score, this film is nothing. Whilst, divorced from Reggio's imagery, Glass's synth and vocal-dominated score has practically become a shorthand for ominous and positively apocalyptic, most notably in the mainstream in Zack Synder's so-so adaption of Watchmen, when combined with the imagery, whether it be slow motion, timelapse, or any matter of human activity, event or creation, it is flawless, a tone poem in which visual and audio are perfectly in sync.
The film begins slowly, with Hopi rock glyphs accompanying Glass's title track, then with the spectacular launch of a Saturn V, before slow pans over rocky landscapes, punctuated with drifting but insistent synth notes, and beautifully shot visuals of the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, of nature in harsh beauty, eventually give way to other shots of the natural world, from waves to volcanic vents to a beautifully shot locked off camera angle of a cave entrance. Glass's score changes, grows dark and almost omnious, with his classic trope of arpeggios, which practically act as a musical shorthand for the encroaching movement of technology in Koyannisqatsi beginning to enter the score and from this, we get a number of the film's trademark high-speed cloud shots, largely shot by master of timelapse photography, Louie Schwartzberg. It is a beautifully edited sequence, showing the power or the planet, neatly intercutting crashing waves and high-speed cloud movement, till the two become almost indistinguishable.
It is only seventeen minutes, as Glass's score leans into its first true arpeggio run alongside a uncut and impressive aerial shot coasting along a river, in that we get a shot, of thousands of tulips being grown, huge sheets of colour flying past the camera, and the first-and surprisingly stark-shot of mankind's impact upon the world, of a half submerged rock valley, like the one in previous sequences, caused by the artifical Lake Powell. Humanity has arrived in the picture, and life is already out of balance, Glass's score swelling to emphasise this. In rapid succession, we get quary detonations, a colossal dump truck among choking coal dust, a long panshot that shows us a conveyor belt across a vast stretch of countryside, power lines, almost abstracted against each other, power stations, dams and oil derricks. The visual language, as Glass's score gathers pace, as the visuals become more violent, concluding with searing footage of atomic bomb tests, is simple. Humanity's acceleration in technology has damaged this world.
And then the film cuts, and for the first time we see people, on a beach, in front of the hulking form of a powerstation, in crowds, followed by two extraordinary long shots, first of clouds reflected on a building, then a plane, appearing, almost akin to Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia, out of the heat haze, the film's longest, and certainly one of its most spectacular, shots before turning to taxi down a runway as another appears in the foreground, eventually taking up the entire frame before it too disappears out of sight. Road shots follow, some stationary, some aerial, all of them showing the flow of hundreds, if not thousands of vehicles, humans again faceless. Following, as Glass once again gathers tempo a dizzying shot of a carpark that reduces cars down to simple blobs of colour, and thousands of massed Soviet tanks, and eventually military aircraft, bombs, missiles and once again, NASA rockets, before with a truly colossal set of explosions...the film cuts to its next sequence.
This largely concerns itself with the built environment, from the glittering skyscrapers of Manhatten to derelict apartment blocks, undercut with one of Glass's iconic pieces, the string led Pruit Igoe, as shots of dirty and messy streets, of the poorest in society, of the wreckage of Chernobyl's nearby cities gives way to brass and a long tracking shot over decayed and derelict housing projects, eventually leading to the spectacular destruction of Pruit Igoe itself. More cloudscapes follow, this time almost entirely blocked out by buildings, after which a truly jawdroping shot of huge numbers of people queueing gives way to more shots of vast crowds walking past camera, billboards and advertising almost omnipresent in the background. Glass's score is little more than a mournful drone here, with the film now shooting individual subjects, including a fighter pilot and a party of women outside a casino, in almost uncomfortably long shots.
And then comes what in short, is the film's masterpiece. The Grid is the perfect marriage of score and visual, intertwined so perfectly that it's impossible to view one without the other. The sequence is practically the film in miniature, slow painterly shots giving way to the rapid-cut, timelapse sped activity of man and his world, with an astonishing number of shots in which cars and vehicles teem past like scores of ants. Reggio again and again approaches this theme, as Glass's arpeggios flurry back and forth to moving traffic, the speed of vehicles ever increasing, till they are almost white and red blurs against the night of the city, or vast rippling waves of almost abstract moment. A shot in a station takes us in first at long range, then till we can see individual people, before a dizzying shot from crowd level disorientates us again. This is the pace of human existence, the pace of human change, of human technology, abstracted from the world.
Sequences of machinery, of things being made and done, from hot dog packing to jeans making to letter sorted, all assisted by, sped up by, technology, take the place of the teeming movement of vehicles, though the action is almost identical, almost abstract blurs of object and action. It never lets up, never falters, the camera at once passive observer and documentor, as arcade games and bowling and cinema and leisure become the theme, all shot at rapid pace-we are, it says simply, forced to live our lives at this pace, to eat and consume and enjoy ourself at a hyper-accelerated rate, aided and abetted by technology.
An astonishing series of shots of car-building follows, with increasing mechanisation, and shots of circuitboards that, of course, bear a striking resemblance to the cities a tthe beginning of the sequence follow, thematically linking back and forth to itself, the grid of the American city giving way to the grid of the circuitboard, and the circuitboard only heightening the city, reciprocating back and forth, till indistingishable. Vantage shots from cars, crowds, shots of cars follow, the pace by now frenetic, almost headache inducing, life at an unbearable speed, as shots of screens, of the worlds of advertising and television and videogames, of television in hyperlapse, a practical blur of images...finally gives way to slow motion shots of people in a casino, the closest the film ever gets to portaiture, till the sequence almost collapses visually into a visual explosion, like 2001's Star Gate on fast-forward, till it is simply light and movement.
And it finally gives way, and collapses into a slow drifting shot over a cityscape, the imagery almost abstract, cellular in shots from thousands of feet up, and Reggio finally, simply shows us computer motherboards, not practically indistinguishable from the grids in which we live in. It's...a surprisingly harrowing sequence, score little more than a drone at first, before slow notes and much slower pace begin to unfurl a series of images, almost entirely at normal speed, and at street level, of, well, us, as a species,from people waiting for lifts, to trains and trams, to portraiture in locked off shots.
And this culminates in the film's final, jawdropping moment, a moment of utter failure, in which a rocket explodes seconds after takeoff. With Glass's score, it's practically elegiac, the greatest achievement of humankind blowing itself apart on screen, to leave simply a tumbling object, falling end over end, on fire, an Icarus straying too close to the sun and, for all his wings, for all his technology, plummeting to earth. The film ends with Hopi prophecies, only compounding the film's message of us living outside our means, and indeed destructively, and cuts to black.
Koyannisqatsi is a masterpiece, not only in its impact upon how films were made-one only needs to look at modern cinema, and even modern advertising and documentary work to see its impact-but in its tone and aim. If it felt like a warning in 1982, it feels like a stark lesson we have not learnt now, in a world sped up even more by the World Wide Web, and social media, in which we are still living out of balance with the world around us. It is a film that everyone needs to see once, if only to realise this, as Reggio would expand upon both themes in the rest of the Qatsi Trilogy.
But moreover, Koyannisqatsi, as pure tone poem, as pure cinema, is a film about how mankind, for better or ill, have remade the world in their own image, how they have made cities vast metropolises of grids, made everything convenient and mechanised,and have polluted and reshaped and changed the world around themselves, and even escaped the confines of this little blue ball, into outer space in our single greatest achievement. Koyannisqatsi is a film about man and technology, and the impact of both on each other, and on the world around them. It is, in the most sweeping way possible, a film about us, at our best and worst.
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