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are nonnarrative, but they have a different visual language.
Koyaanisqatsi
was intrinsically exciting because of the spectacle that we've made out of the world.
Powaqqatsi
is more like a long poem. I know there are problems with both filmsand I've learned from what I consider mistakesbut I feel very fortunate about both films. They have a life of their own.
MacDonald:
Is it fair to say that the films reverse a set of traditions in commercial narrative films? Most movies focus on upper-middle-class individuals and their adventures, whereas
Koyaanisqatsi
reveals how all these theoretically "big" people are really little parts of a giant machine.
Powaqqatsi
does the opposite: it's normal in American entertainment movies to depict third-world people as background or, at best, as sidekicks, but you make them the center of attention.
Reggio:
Exactly. The human being has more dignity in the South, because the South turns on the presence of human beings and their work. In
this
world, in the North, the human being is no longer the measure of life: we've been crushed into a synthetic environment that is no longer human. Even major characters of historyHitler, Stalin, Churchill, Rooseveltare unimportant. What is important is the nature of the massmass man. But in the South, which represents maybe two thirds of the planet's population, the human being is still the measure of life.
MacDonald: Koyaanisqatsi
is framed by a long, continuous shot of a rocket taking off and then exploding and descending. Within that frame, there's a movement from rural to city with an increasingly frenetic pace until the final section where you slow down for several portraits of individual street people. One of the things that troubles me, and one of the things critics talked about, is that until you know that that rocket
is
going to fall and until we see the definition of "koyaanisqatsi," there's no way to know what the message of the city material is. It could provoke one to say, "Oh, this is wildly frenetic anti-technology footage,"
or
to say, "Isn't it incredible how well this all works!"
Reggio:
What I wanted to reveal was the beauty
of
the beast. People perceive this as beautiful
because
there's nothing else to perceive. If one lives in this world, in the industrialized city, all one can see is one layer of commodity piled upon another. There's no ability to see beyond, to see that we've encased ourselves in an artificial environment that has replaced nature. We don't live
with
nature any longer; we live above it; we look at it as
resources
to keep this artificial environment going. I was trying to raise questions, and I worked on the premise that there must be an ambiguity built into the films if they're going to be art. Otherwise, they would become driving, didactic, propagandistic pieces. I look at the structure of each film in a "trilectic" sense. There's the image, there's