Koyaanisqatsi - Modernity and Cataclysm
We were meant to hike Croagh Patrick but instead we got rained in. Was reminded of another essay I wrote when I used to make money writing scripts for random people's video essays on youtube
We were sailing and hiking around Mayo until the weather went to shit. It was a nice little respite from the island hopping picnics and we got to veg out and eat brack all day. Forgot I wrote this script for for some blokes youtube video until a conversation about Hezbollah turned into Iz telling me all about her nuclear war obsessed grandad. We then both rewatched Koyaanisqatsi. The film’s odd, but not in a trying to be odd for oddity’s sake way. We both happen the share the horrible burden of only being able to enjoy a film if it is trying to say something. I hope everyone is well in their various dwellings; university ended and all of a sudden everyone has been scattered across the globe and I’m struggling to stay in contact. Anyway I’ll let you read it.
What's it like to view the world for the first time with a fresh pair of eyes from a completely different perspective? This is a question American humanitarian-turned-director Godfrey Reggio examines in his 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi. Having spent several years working for the Institute for Regional Education, which he co-founded in 1972, Reggio was suddenly confronted with the withdrawal of financial support from the American Civil Liberties Union. With only forty thousand dollars left in their budget and the institute's future looking uncertain, cinematographer Ron Fricke, who helped to produce several TV adverts with the institute, suggested that their remaining funds should be directed into the production of the film.
The resulting project, Koyaanisqatsi, is an experimental documentary-come-visual-time poem, a collaboration between Reggio, Fricke, and minimalist composer Philip Glass. It takes the viewer from the desolate mesas of the American Southwest to the overwhelming urban jungles of the modern metropolis. Lacking the traditional trappings of narrative cinema, such as plot and characters, Reggio presents us with a disassociated impression of the modern world that still manages to strike an emotional core with the viewer, forcing us to re-examine the ever-accelerating world that we live in.
The film's title comes from the language of the Hopi people, natives to the Arizona region. In the opening moments, we're shown the title, but as a majority anglophonic audience, we have no idea what it means. This distancing is absolutely deliberate on Reggio's part. "I wished for Koyaanisqatsi not to have any name at all. Since I was forced to take a word, I felt that I wanted a word that had no cultural baggage, that had no preconceived meaning surrounding it." While the Hopi themselves are absent from the film, their spirit and way of life are absolutely essential to its construction. From the very beginning, our experience of the world through the film is framed by this ancient culture. While the opening petroglyphs are believed to have been completed by the so-called Fremont people, neighbors of the Hopi, the image nevertheless evokes America's pre-colonialist past, and its reappearance at the very end of the film confirms its purpose as an important piece of cultural context.
As the deep, resonant score by composer Philip Glass kicks in, powered by a droning pipe organ, we hear the title chanted by a chorus of basso profundo singers. This Western classical instrumentation contrasts the Hopi word being chanted, resulting in a combination of religions and cultures. We might view this combination as a reflection of Reggio's perspective: at the age of 14, he had entered a Catholic brotherhood, and through his humanitarian work, he became friends with several people from the Hopi community. But then, out of the blue, the screen is filled with sparks and flames as we are cast from this ancient time to the near future, witnessing a rocket taking off. We now have two mysteries in the back of our minds for the runtime of the film: What does Koyaanisqatsi mean, and why are we seeing this at this exact time?
From this solemn, spiritual opening, the film then continues with what could be seen as a linear narrative. We're taken through the mesas of the Southwest, above the clouds, across lakes, and along ravines, with Glass's score becoming more fluent and animated as nature is shown at work. The aerial photography, similar to the opening shots captured in the 1980 film The Shining, was conducted by Ron Fricke in the Four Corners region around Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. The camera glides as if in search of something. In Hopi mythology, it's said that the purpose of their people, and mankind in general, is to travel to the furthest corners of the Earth, leaving markings to signal where they'd been. We could therefore view the wandering camera, emerging from the valleys of the ancient settlers, as embodying the spirit of the Hopi.
This calmness and fluidity is interrupted when we reach the edges of this natural world, which is suddenly crumbling and exploding around us. The introduction of industrial technology is accompanied by equally threatening synth notes, the first appearance of digital instrumentation in Glass's score. It's hardly a comforting sight, especially compared with the beauty of the previous environment. Just as the land is corrupted by technology, so too is the acoustic ensemble, with the pipe organ now being used to evoke the vast power of electricity instead of the clouds and water.
It's here that we also see people for the first time in the film, as workmen operating the machinery. The mechanical processes seem to be accelerating, the music becoming more pronounced, both reaching such an intensity that we are suddenly shown the next step in this chain of production: the creation of the atom bomb. This evocation is incredibly powerful, especially when we consider the Hopi context for the film. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was seen by some Hopi as the fulfillment of a prophecy about the "Day of Purification," when a "container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans." This makes the sudden cut to the explosion seem itself prophetic, as if we're being shown what will—or what has—come of this technological development.
One of the most chaotic sequences, the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe apartment block in St. Louis, Missouri, is given particular attention. Initially, the camera seems unusually static, settling on the ruined and unkempt as opposed to the ordered and efficient, but the score, although subdued, seems to be bubbling with intensity. It then begins to reach its peak complexity, utilizing cross-rhythms and irregular time signatures to completely throw us off as things seem to become incredibly unbalanced. But we've been warned of this—the musical motifs here were foreshadowed in the energy plant sequence, and the insistent choral passages seem less innocent than in the floating chorals of the vessel sequence.
Just when it seems like the film is at breaking point, the opening string motif returns, lowering the energy but suggesting a cyclical nature to this destructive process.
The majority of the film then takes place in this urban environment, as Reggio shows us the natural flow behind the modern world and how, despite the chaos we've just seen, as a society, we're hardwired into this larger process. Even just by going about our day as normal, everyone exists within the host of technology, so it's not the effect of it; it's that everything exists within. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, so we are no longer conscious of its presence. The longest, most intense part of the film is also the most ambiguously presented. Whereas previous set pieces have been painted ominously with destructive imagery and monotonality, the grid is dominated by colorful neon visuals enlivened by time lapses and hyperactive accompanying music. Cars dissolve into strips of light, carving out street blocks. Industrial-scale machines and workers work in tandem to churn out never-ending lines of hot dogs and Twinkies—symbols of Americana. Products are assembled, eaten, exchanged, and cash is handed over. Everything seems perfectly timed, with each transition between shots revealing another stage in an interconnected ecosystem. It's incredibly impressive, but it keeps going on and on, the music introducing more and more instruments, then starting again for over 20 minutes as we see early Reaganism and 80s consumerism in their early high-powered years. By the end of the extended sequence, we're left completely exhausted by the constant time lapses, which have reduced everything to microbes, ghosts, or components on a motherboard.
Having reached its climax, the film then gives us time to breathe and process the mania we've just witnessed. The camera, now at a normal speed, glides woozily over the city with a muted score playing eerie sounds like wet wine glasses in discordant and mournful harmonies. As the aerial shots then morph gradually into shots of computer parts and microchips, our modern world becomes digital. From this completely alien, disturbing impression of life, Reggio then takes us to a closer and more personal level than previously. In what I find to be the most powerful sequence of the film, we look into the eyes of regular people in the midst of this accelerated chaos. Some look lethal at the prospect of being on the big screen, some glance furtively away, and others are thankful to be seen at all. We see the fallout of this technological progress and how dehumanizing it is. This slower, more reflective mood is accompanied by the familiar church organ from the beginning, as well as a new kind of quiet, more explicitly classical than the others. The piece is called "Prophecies" because that's what they're singing.
Once again, these prophecies are from the Hopi. On top of the one we talked about earlier, we have these: "If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster. Near the Day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky." And then the opening music returns, this time an octave higher, but once again we see the rocket taking off. Was the opening itself a prophecy as the shuttle shoots off in the sky, burning up and spinning ever out of control? It's hard not to feel a sense of dread and inevitability that this is where we'll end up. Just like that, we're back in the world of the ancient Native Americans, our tour guides through modernity: Koyaanisqatsi—crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating; a state of life that calls for another way of living. To take a word as inscrutable from a non-literate language from a culture of morality, I felt, was fantastic. They have a whole different take on things. It's the opportunity to find inspiration in another person's point of view about the life that we all live. It's a salute to a language that is more powerful in its descriptive capacity to describe the world in which we live. Forty years on, in a time when we face environmental and ecological disaster on an unprecedented scale, with weather patterns becoming more disrupted and unbalanced, accelerating with our consumerist lifestyles, Koyaanisqatsi is just as, if not more, powerful than it was when it was released. Detached from a myopic focus, with no distractions like plot or character, it's able to say an awful lot without uttering one word of English, instead embracing an external viewpoint in order to show us what we're too busy to notice.