Koyaanisqatsi - no snappy title needed (Koyaanisqatsi (DVD))

Name: demosthenes

Hello doyoo user, You have to be logged in to use these functions... Login or register Close window

Send message to member

Product:	Koyaanisqatsi (DVD)
Date:	30/10/01 (323 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: unusual, will make you think about how you live your life

Disadvantages: can be a bit tiring

Koyaanisqatsi… what a wonderful word. The director, Mr Reggio, said on FilmFour the other night, that he envisioned a film that reversed the maxim, a picture can tell a thousand words, into a thousand images repeat a single word. Koyaanisqatsi, an unknown and difficult word, yet with its own distinct flavour, is a Hopi word referring to a life lived in chaos, in madness, in unnatural excess.

Images and music comprise the entire film: there are no actors, there is no plot, and no dialogue. The narrative, such as it is, emerges from the theme, which is… koyaanisqatsi. Reggio presents a series of images, stitched into a film, although there is an organic movement between images and themes, that are accompanied by the music of Philip Glass. Reggio brought Glass into the project, which took seven years and was independent of any studio, quite early on, and so the images and the music were co-created and are, as Reggio insists, co-equal, the one supporting, enlivening and investing narrative and meaning in the other. Apart, they are just pictures and sounds, but together they are a narrative of the dissolution of the natural world, the destruction of earth not just by the machines of man, but by the way we live, our technological, consumerist society.

The film opens with an enigmatical image, ice falling past some kind of metal structure, all black and white and red, smoke billowing, fire burning etc. the music is tragic and powerful, four or five male base voices intoning: Koyaanisqatsi… koyaanisqatsi. Then the scene ends (because it is a scene, because it has emotional impact and draws you in, makes you wonder what you’re seeing), and we begin to see landscapes, then clouds, then arable fields, then power plants, then machines digging, then earth demolition, then a city, then cars moving etc. The narrative leads you from the extraordinary beauty natural world into a gradual, but accelerating and deepening, implication in the wor
ks of men (as it were). One of the puzzling and powerful things about this film, I think, is that whilst it is undeniably didactic, making a clear statement that life as we live it is unnatural, it simultaneously shows you the beauty of the manmade world. It is as if the film is applauding the creativity and energy and achievements of men, but then denouncing the paradigm, the lifestyle, into which those energies are directed.

It is difficult to describe such a wordless film. I am still trying to wrap my brain around what Reggio and Glass and the visual director have created: a thousand pictures that say one, obscure word.

The images accelerate and become more hectic as the film progresses: it is as if you are being drawn into the belly of a beast, only seeing madness and frantic activity, hordes of people and armies of machines by the end of the film. And just when you begin to think you might have had enough, that Glass’s ululating organs strains and the speeded up images of car assembly lines and New York traffic are going to do your head in, the whole thing stops. We return to the opening image and the opening music, the intonation, in a resonant tone, of… Koy-aan-isqatsi. The ice falls, and this time the camera pulls away, distancing itself from the madness, and we see what it was we were first looking at. And it is beautiful and it is terrifying. The films ends with a taste of death, and a taste of eternity, a single object spinning, in exquisite tragedy, to the music of Glass.

The film ends, and red text writes itself across your screen, saying something like: Koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi word, meaning a life lived in madness, a life undone.

BRILLIANT!

Summary: