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April 19, 2004

Why "Koyaanisqatsi" is Excellent

"Terry, you ignorant slut."

OK, that will be the extent of my belligerence. I can totally see how "Koyaanisqatsi" would turn somebody off if he were looking at it from a "technical" point of view, even though I think "Koyaanisqatsi" can be appreciated in the "technical" sense w/r/t montage - though the filmmakers do not exactly use true Eisensteinian montage in the Qatsi trilogy, it is the succession of images as much as the content of images that communicates the "meaning" (to put it crudely) of the film.

This film is a powerful (but not preachy) "statement" (which might be too strong a word) about the dehumanizing effects of technology and modern life. I do not think it's a "deep message about the environment," as Terry put it (at least not in the conventional political sense), though Man's triumph over (and resulting detachment from) nature is a major characteristic of much of the imagery.

Much of the second half of the film is comprised of imagery of megalopoli - the filmmakers devote much of their energy and resources towards capturing the characteristics of these supercities in unconventional ways. Time-lapse photography of superhighways evoke images of blood being pumped through veins; combined with the same sort of time-laspe photography of pedestrian traffic, the movie suggests that modern cities are indeed monstrous organisms, made of concrete and blood and glass and sinew. Yet the hardened, joyless faces of the people who comprise the building blocks of the modern city suggest that it is less than the sum of its parts. The "grid"-like characteristics of these cities further suggest that while the modern city may be a sort of organism, much of it is inorganic and unnatural. These images of cityscapes are juxtaposed with with the images of the film's first half - those of naturalistic landscapes and cloudscapes. There is a progression; a story is being told through imagery alone - the highest form of montage.

"Koyaanisqatsi" is a documentary in a sense; it examines mankind's sterile dream (to paraphrase Lewis Mumford) to live in a world of its own making - isolated from nature - and it touches upon each man's sterile dream to live close to yet isolated from his fellow man. It does not necessarily advocate a "back to nature" Thoreau/Emerson-esque philosophy, though I'm sure that some viewers could certainly come away with that feeling.

Which brings me to this: we've talked a lot in recent days about the meaning that art holds for the experiencer (in the wake of Mikey's colleagues' music). The preceding is the meaning it holds for me, despite the fact that I wrote it in the declarative. I first saw this in a high school class in which we had read Mumford's The City in History and Philip Slater's The Pursuit of Loneliness, both of which deal with the dehumanizing effects of technology and of the modern city/suburb. If art holds some intrinsic meaning (a big "if"), I sensed and interpreted it in this movie after having read those wonderfully sobering works. In the end, I thought it was quite powerful, beautifully done, and culturally/sociologically relevant.

I do not think you are ignorant, Terry, nor do I think you are a slut. I do wish, though, that you had been able to see this excellent film through the same eyes I did way back when.

On edit - cleaned up some grammar.