Review #209: 'Koyaanisqatsi' (1982)

Godfrey Reggio's film uses only images and music to portray it's meaning. There is no dialogue, and no narrator occupies the films space. The juxtaposition of music and image create a message, which is a quite obvious environmental one. We are shown the natural world, and also the products of civilisation, the man-made world of industry. Philip Glass's rapturous score uses signifiers to exacerbate the meaning, and the opinion of the film maker. The sequences of natural spaces are imagined musically with delicate symphonies, passages of beauty. The unnatural world has bellicose strokes, dramatic and dark; occasionally lamentable.

We are shown natural landscapes of America, its mountainous places littered with cavernous hallways cut through its heart. Aerial shots glide over pastures, deep valleys, mountain ranges. Cities shot in time-lapse, rise from the water, cities cutting into the sky, reflecting the moving clouds, but denying it's reality by distorting it, making it constructed. Cities at night, streams of light slither through the roads cutting into the buildings, towering. This is where the message of the film falters. I saw the similarities with the streaming lights of motor vehicles through a night time city, are much like the aerial shots that manoeuvre over the valleys sculpted by the movement of water, long since dried up. We are therefore seeing in nature its own self destruction.

The city also becomes derelict, "left-for-dead". Once natural landscapes raped by construction, abandoned, useless, left for decay. People occupy only a short time in the film. We see crowds clogging the streets, hundreds of anonymous faces, public buildings see the scuffling of existential nothingness. Fire and nuclear explosions signal man's devoted exploration of destruction.

The film is undeniably beautiful. Even the man-made edifices, that we are supposed to find repugnant in the context of the film, are often gorgeous. In one shot (the longest single shot in the film) we begin to see on the horizon a Boeing 747 moving slowly towards the camera, the plane ripples in the heat distortion emanating from the hot tarmac.

The title is taken from the Hopi language, and is translated as meaning "life out of balance". So the meaning of the film is quite clear. Mans destruction of nature. As stated before, the meaning is dissipated by the beauty of each opposing image. But aside from this it is nice to watch. And the music alone is wonderful. It could be seen to be a history of violence on nature.


Directed by: Godfrey Reggio
Country: USA

Rating: ****

Marc Ivamy