Koyaanisqatsi

Koyaanisqatsi – 1982, Godfrey Reggio

Koyaanisqatsi (skip to 29 seconds) is one of the most influential films ever made. This is precisely the reason it’s not worth watching. If you watch TV, you’ve basically seen Koyaanisqatsi. The film is made up almost entirely of time lapse footage of stuff that looks cool when shot using time lapse. It starts off with ‘nature’, clouds and shadows and such, and then switches to ‘man’ or ‘technology’ or whatever with people passing through stations during rush hour and footage of assembly lines.

The most familiar parts of Koyaanisqatsi are footage of cars on highways at night (in time laps of course). To modern audiences this kind of stuff is instantly recognisable from car adverts and other films (Blade springs to mind for some reason). Seeing the red and white lights wiz past in patterns dictated by traffic lights is interesting in small doses, but in 1982 this stuff was new and amazing. So interesting that Koyaanisqatsi devotes about 20 minutes to it. There’s another 20 minutes each of factory assembly lines and large crowds walking through cities.

The point the film makers were getting at was some hippie bullshit about ‘impending disaster caused by the modern industrialised world’. Koyaanisqatsi means ‘life out of balance’ in Hopi. So keen was the director to provide an accurate translation of the Hopi language that he employed 6 Hopi consultants (at least that’s how many are credited). Yet in interviews the director is predictably vague about the meaning of his film and how it’s for the viewer to decide. He just ‘presents us with the evidence blah blah blah’.

After the first half hour I played the rest of Koyaanisqatsi DVD at double speed and the experience was no worse or better than it would have been otherwise. In fact you only need to watch about five minutes of it to appreciate what they were getting at.

Needless to say I won’t be watching either of the sequels.