Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

I've wanted to see Koyaanisqatsi for many years now, so when an opportunity to see it on the big screen at BYU's International Cinema came up I took it. Koyaanisqatis is a very original, very unusual movie, it lacks any traditional narrative, I suppose you'd call it a documentary but perhaps a better description would be a film collage. Images without narration take us from the pristine desert of the American South West (all the footage in this film appears to have been shot in the U.S.) to nuclear explosions there, to industrial and commercial buildings, traffic jams and dirty streets in New York and Los Angeles, snippets of radio and television, people filling through train stations, the mass production of everything from automobiles to snack cakes, the pace of the images, of life and the world going increasingly faster and faster. As I watched these images in their relentnless procession I knew the film was making me feel something, and feel it strongly, but I couldn't quite tell what that feeling was, that is until the end when in text on the screen they tell you what Koyaanisqatsi means, its a Hopi language word that translates loosely as "unbalanced life", which is what the films presents, our ultimately unsustainable economic and human order of the modern world. One element of the film which I found fascinating, and which by its nature wouldn't have been part of the viewing experience for its original audiances was a weird sense of nostalgia. The world presented in the film is the world of the very early 1980's, the world of my first dawning of conciseness , the outfits the cars etc are of a past, but that past is just a forerunner of our present, everything we see in the film is still happening today, only even faster. Koyaanisqatsi is a film to be experienced, to be in a way soaked in, and seeing it on a big screen only helps that experience. The soundtrack by Philip Glass is probably his best and most iconic work. Koyaanisqatsi is really a great work of both art and commentary. ****