BeigeJournal

I first saw Koyaanisqatsi quite a few years ago and I loved it. Unfortunately, it was out of print at the time, so I could not buy my own copy of the tape. Now, in the DVD era, it is again available, and I picked up a copy the other day. I paid $11 at the downtown Milwaukee Borders. There are two more in the series, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi, which I’m going to have to see as well.

It is not really a normal movie. There are no characters, no dialog. It consists of images, mostly time-lapse or high-speed, set to music. Time-lapse clouds and traffic. Pedestrians in both time-lapse and high-speed. Factories in time-lapse. It is just beautiful. It is very much a case of what you get out of it depends on what you bring to it. (As Tom Lehrer said, “Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it.”) It is not really explicitly anti-technology (it isn’t explicitly anything), and could be read as something of a celebration of technology, tempered by the realization that so much of what we’ve built is tacky and ugly, and the shear quantity of technological stuff the Earth is blanketed with.

I have to mention my favorite scene, which is the last one of the movie. An Atlas rocket is shown lifting off, accelerating in the sky, and blowing up. A piece of the rocket, I think the sustainer engine still attached to a bit of the structure, is followed by the camera as it spirals down, burning, smoke and flame puffing out as it rotates in the air. Organ music plays. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it, but I really like this.

The DVD includes an interview with director Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass which is very interesting.

I highly recommend it.