Koyaanisqatsi (1983) Directed by Godfrey Reggio
I originally saw Koyaanisqatsi on a laserdisc a few years ago. This afternoon I watched it at a cinema on a brand new print.
Koyaanisqatsi is an 87 minute film with no narration, just images of nature and mankind accompanied with music by Philip Glass. The message is pretty obvious: we're messing up earth, and if you look at things objectively, everything we do and everything we build doesn't really matter.
It removes us from our traditional frame of reference by speeding everything up. Motorways start to resemble blood flowing through veins and people walking through crowded city streets look like water in a stream. Individuals seem worthless.
The first 10 minutes looks at the natural landscapes of America and is very impressive. There's no human life in these images of natural beauty. The bulk of the film is made up of images of cities, buildings and technology, time-lapsed and speeded up to look unnatural, ridiculous and strangely worthless.
Technically this film is excellent. One image sticks in my mind. A woman on a tube-train. We're looking straight at her, with the window behind her. Everything outside is speeded up and blurred, but she's sitting perfectly still.
Time-lapse tracking shots are used. We walk through a train station while everyone else madly races past.
I'm not sure if one and a half hours was needed, but it certainly does pass quickly. The music is very haunting and fit the visuals perfectly. Sometimes Glass's score sounds like a loud mess. But that was probably the point.
On a television this film would lose most of its impact. The film rests on its visuals and the details would be hard to see. Aside from this, this is one film that would be perfect on DVD. I'd buy it for sure.
SUMMARY: If you want to see something engaging, mesmerising and different, watch this.
Samir Khan s.h.khan@hw.ac.uk
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