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Thompson's
N.Y., N.Y.
(1957)and in particular, with the frequent use of time-lapse photography to reveal the patterns of city life, evident in
The Man with a Movie Camera,
as well as in Marie Menken's
Go Go Go
(1964), Hilary Harris's
Organism
(1975), and Peter von Ziegesar's
Concern for the City
(1986).
After a mysterious opening shot that is not explained until the conclusion of the film,
Koyaanisqatsi
presents gorgeous, real-time and time-lapse aerial imagery of spectacular Southwestern landscapes, including remarkable imagery of Monument Valley that reveals its contours in a manner strikingly different from the way John Ford used the same spaces in so many Westerns. Having created a sense of the grandeur and dignity of these landscapes, Reggio moves toward the city (by way of strip mines, a nuclear power plant, and electric power lines), and by combining telephoto shooting and time lapse, reveals the modern city as a gigantic machine and the human beings who live there as its moving parts.
Koyaanisqatsi
emphasizes a paradox: Reggio's use of time lapse discovers, again and again, the remarkable degree to which the city-machine
does
functiontraffic zooms along expressways; cars and crowds pulse across New York streets; the day's work gets accomplishedbut at the same time, the primary product of the machine seems to be the destruction of individuality and serenity. The commercial cinema focuses on individuals, singing the beauties of particular faces and bodies, and honoring individuals' abilities to effect resolutions to whatever problems they face. In
Koyaanisqatsi
Reggio critiques this central dimension of the popular cinema, by revealing that our trust in individuality is often a function of our ability to blind ourselves (really and cinematically) to the larger patterns within which what we call individuality is subsumed.
The conclusion of
Koyaanisqatsi
provides a completion of the mysterious opening shot, revealing it to be the thrusting jets of a rocket that subsequently blasts off and explodes, its fragments tumbling slowly back to earth, and a definition of the film's title: "ko yaa nis qatsi (from the Hopi language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living." The frame provided by the rocket image and the definition are Reggio's implicit critique of the commercial cinema's general reliance on optimistic resolution and its reconfirmation of the commodification of contemporary life.
While
Koyaanisqatsi
cinematically recontextualizes the individual in modern, industrialized society, placing him or her in the background and bringing to the foreground the larger social-industrial machine,
Powaqqatsi
cinematically recontextualizes the masses of women and men in third-world societies, removing them from the background to the foreground of our attention and allowing us to observe them not as cine-