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Koyaanisqatsi

A couple of weeks ago I finally watched the 1982 experimental film Koyaanisqatsi, 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.

English Wikipedia page on Koyaanisqatsi

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.