T3 Film #1 Koyaanisqatsi

Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (1982, Godfrey Reggio)

The first thing to strike me about the film was that the first third of the film was uninhabited; only natural landscapes, and intense slow moving imagery. The first people we see interact with nature in a jarring image of a sunbathing family on the beach, oblivious to the huge power plant and dirt road behind them, a metaphor perhaps for humans ignorance to the effect we are having on the natural world.

Screen city methodology

An article by Cambridge Professor, Francois Penz, describes a way in which films about the city can be analysed, using three modes:

Film Genre Context

City Symphony: A typical city symphony would loosely follow the course of a day in the life of the city, creating a unity between space and time. Koyaanisqatsi almost seems to follow the structue of a day in the life of the United States, using a cyclical montage of imagery to describe the natural and urban landscape of the country over the period of a day. We are taken from early morning over the canyons and dunes to the sunset reflecting on the sharp glass edges of city buildings, to the evening lights of the city traffic and the large moon sliding behind a skyscraper. The city symphony, described by Penz(1), ‘its form – montage – was to prove critical to the history of cinema, and essential to any understanding of the relationship between cinema and the architecture of the city.’ We can see a similarity to documentary due to the films rhythmic, non-fictional framework, observing the outside world, as Charles Musser(2) states, ‘the shift in cultural outlook associated with documentary is also evident in the cycle of city symphony films, which […] took a modernist look at metropolitan life.’ Almost metaphor for the evolution of the planet; starting with nature, initial effect of mankind, the industrial revolution (large factories and production lines), modern office culture and consumerism.

Manipulation

The style of the film is effective in portraying the temporal city and its inhabitants. As we see the films 'real life' actors performing for the cameras, we get a sense of the fashions and dynamic of the decade in which it is set.

Digital City

The use of music throughout the film sets a pace at which we see the differing landscapes and city of the US. The inclusion of chants in the hopi language adds meaning to this musical backdrop, though a meaning we only learn in the credits at the end of the film.

The film in its entirety is a document of the social and natural impact we, as a western world make. Fields and fields of cultivated flowers, and booming industry, an exploration of mankind’s effects on nature, going from nature to mining, power plants, aeroplanes, trucks, tanks and atomic bombs. In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means "crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living".

(1) See Francois Penz, ‘Architecture and the Screen from Photography to Synthetic Imaging’ in Architectures of
Illusion, ed. Maureen Thomas & Francois Penz, (Intellect Books, 2003) pp.144-145

(2) Charles Musser, ‘Documentary’, The Oxford History of World Cinema: The definitive history of cinema
worldwide, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) p.90