Koyaanisqatsi
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A couple of weeks ago I finally watched the 1982 experimental film
Koyaanisqatsi[1], after being aware of and vaguely interested in it
for several years. I watched it on YouTube, as a playlist of many
separate videos. Don't be fooled by the French-titled video which
appears to be the whole thing in a single video - that's actually
the film played entirely in reverse. I am way too embarrassed
to admit how long I made it through that version before realising
what was going on. It says a lot about the film that this wasn't
immediately obvious. It perhaps says less about *me* than you might
immediately expect. I know full well what conventional audio played
in revers sounds like, but I'm also enough of a weird experimental
music buff that I'm fully aware there were times when that was all
the rage and you couldn't really claim with a straight face to be an
experimental artist without overindulging in it. More of a 70s thing
than an 80s thing, but maybe Philip Glass was late to the party.
Anyway, Koyaanisqatsi is what is apparently called a "non-narrative
film". There are no actors, or characters, or dialogue, or
voice overs. It is just roughly 1.5 hours of time lapse and slow
motion video footage with an accompanying minimalist soundtrack,
very artsy fartsy stuff. At times the footage and soundtrack
are very carefully synchronised, making them basically a combined
media entity. Even if you've never heard of Koyaanisqatsi, you
almost certainly have heard some of the soundtrack. It opens with
a kind of deep, slow organ and chanting motif which has been very
widely reused as stock "sinister" music - Scrub fans will recognise
it as the backdrop to the Janitor giving JD the stink eye.
The film basically progresses from beautiful images of pristine
looking natural scenery to images of industrial mass production and
urban lifestyles characterised by hyperconsumerism and mass media.
Humanity makes its first appearance not in the form of actual human
beings but in the forms of the things we build and how we build
them, particularly mines and power grids, marring those pristine
landscapes, but eventually there are a lot of human beings too,
usually en masse, scurrying through cities, working on assembly
lines, staring at screens. It's not exactly subtle commentary, let's
be honest. I'd like to be charitable and say maybe it was fresh
in its day, but I kind of doubt even that. The cinematography very
well may have been, I dunno, but I'm pretty sure the overall message
would have been no shocking insight to a 60s hippy. Then again,
here we are 40 years later and it's not a message which has sunk
in enough to change the course of humanity in any meaningful way,
so perhaps it's wrong to characterise it as beating a dead horse.
It's a message I'm sympathetic too, anyway, so I don't really mind.
The name "Koyaanisqatsi", incidentally, is a word in the native
American Hopi language. The film itself offers a number of rough
English translations at the end. My personal favourite, by far,
is "a state of life that calls for another way of living".
Don't mistake my snark about the lack of subtlety for my having
disliked the film. I didn't. I wouldn't say I loved it, either,
but it was worth watching. I didn't get bored. I'm not sure I
will watch the rest of the trilogy. The follow ups, Powaqqatsi
(1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002) seem much less highly regarded;
the English Wikipedia pages for those two films plus the page for
the entire Qatsi trilogy all summed up are shorter than the page
for Koyaanisqatsi, and the Rotten Tomato approval ratings go 91%,
63%, 48%. I don't put *that* much stock in such things, and if I
absolutely loved the first one I'd feel a contrarian urge to watch
and enjoy the others, but as it is, meh.
By strange coincidence, about a week after watching it, I was on a
many hours long bus ride for work. The whole time I was listening
to Berlin school electronica - really spacey, repetitive stuff that
can easily induce a kind of trance-like mindset - while reading
David Wallace-Wells' "The Uninhabitable Earth". Every now and
then I'd pause reading for a bit to brood on the sheer magnitude
of industrial human presence and it's impact on the planet, and
looking out the window I'd see, in the neighbouring lanes of the
highway, a never ending stream of traffic, a large proportion of it
trucks transporting stuff, and in the background a shuffle-repeat
loop of forest, farmland, and wind and solar farms. The music
combined with the constantly changing imagery combined with the
solemn mindset collectively had a surprisingly strong and surreal
effect on my perception, like I had achieved a subtly altered state
of consciousness, and the whole thing immediately reminded me of
Koyaanisqatsi. I didn't get anywhere near as strong an effect for
the film, but I guess maybe Godfrey Reggio's hope in directing it was
that people would, and indeed, maybe some people have. I'm convinced
it's possible. I suspect the film would probably be quite something
to watch under the influence of genuinely mind-altering substances.
[1]
https://en.wkipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi
