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Customer Reviews of Koyaanisqatsi - Life Out of Balance

A Love Letter to Skyscrapers
Koyaanisqatsi opens with stately, wide-angle shots of mesa fields and clouds. The world they depict is vast, uninhabited, almost unearthly. This continues for about a quarter of the movie's length, lulling you into a pastoral reverie. Then suddenly the Philip Glass score becomes more insistent and earthmovers loom up from out of nowhere. Man has arrived, and he's up to no good. What began as ode to unspoiled nature becomes eerie urban dystopia, a montage of slums, factories, and city streets through which hordes of people scuttle in speeded-up motion. (Is "koyaanisqatsi" also the Hopi word for "time-lapse photography"?) In the final sequence a rocket roars off the launch pad only to explode in mid-air, and the camera follows a burning engine as it tumbles Icarus-like back to earth. Then, just in case we've somehow missed the point, the title of the film appears on a black background along with its translation: "a way of life that calls for another way of living".

The great thing is, it's entirely possible to miss the point. Director Godfrey Reggio is too inspired a cinematographer for his own good. The sumptuousness of his images keeps undercutting the film's ham-fisted man-as-spoiler message and replacing it with something subtler and more humane. Though the opening landscape shots are beautiful in a National Geographic sort of way, the movie only gets going after it moves into the city. The most distinctive part of Koyaanisqatsi is its time-lapse footage of man-made environments: images of headlights racing down freeways, office building windows blinking on and off, and crowds streaming through Grand Central Station. In the last of these, it seems that all this speed is supposed to be dehumanizing, to make people look like insects, but instead the bustle is jittery and comic, like an old silent film. Crowds that might have been anonymous if filmed at normal speed become individuated as your eye is drawn around, frantically making note of all the faces, gaits, and endearingly bad late-seventies hairstyles. You're literally people watching, and the effect is a humanist one, warm and oddly touching.

There's a similar happy misstep in the depiction of technology. Roughly speaking, progress is this bad guy in Reggio's world, with the role of progress played by cities. (As opposed to pristine mesa fields and cloudscapes.) Unfortunately for Reggio, urban settings are stubbornly cinematic. Try to make a beautiful movie about an ugly city and you'll end up making your city look beautiful. (Blade Runner and Metropolis had the same problem.) Though Koyaanisqatsi's official position is a sort of anti-technological moralism, Reggio (like so many moralizers) ends up making the thing he condemns more compelling than the thing he praises. Sprawl has never looked so appealing. Even a side trip into a processed cheese factory is less a swipe at consumer society than a welcome bit of comic relief. Reggio's cityscapes are so strange and vibrant that it seems worth paving over a little nature to have built them. Koyaanisqatsi may have been conceived as an ecological warning, but it ends up being a love letter to skyscrapers.

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"Until now you've never really seen your world."
Those words were used in the trailer for this unique film, and appear on the poster as well. More than almost anything else, I think, that sums up the movie's intentions. This is a film about observing our lives as we live it, but in a manner that forces us to see everything anew, to see both the harmony and the imbalance for what it is. In the words of Godfrey Reggio, we are seeing "the beauty of the beast."

The movie does away with traditional narrative -- no plot, no story, no characters, no dialogue (not in English, anyway) -- and gives us instead a pure experience, something that other movies often try to do and don't achieve. By starting in a world without man and gradually adding him, we see that the world as we live it has become an artificial extension of our will. We don't use technology; we live it. But the movie is not blanket-condemning this -- the whole sequence "The Grid" shows mankind and his technological envelope coexisting in grand harmony, producing, living, interacting.

When the movie does focus on the individual human being, a strange thing happens: because of the way the movie sees, the people we see seem strange, distant. When was the last time we really looked at someone, in the same way this movie forces us to really look at things? That's the main issue here, I think -- it's an education film in that it teaches us how to see our world all over again and think broad-mindedly about it. We can use our world badly (the atomic bomb) or we can use it intelligently and resourcefully (the nuclear power plant, in front of which we see people cheerfully sunning themselves).

"Koyaanisqatsi" means life out of balance, of course, and I think the title applies to the film in a cautionary sense. We can live in harmony not only with our natural world but with our technological world, the one we have substituted for tha natural world. Or we can live badly with either, or both. The movie shows examples of all of the above, and quietly reminds us that beneath the skin of our technology we're still human, and we require humanity more than technology.

About the aspect ratio issue: I have seen the movie in 1.33:1 and 1.85:1, and as far as I can tell this is the most correct aspect ratio for the film. The 1.33:1 prints appear to be cropped from the sides -- I have stills of the movie in that aspect ratio and they are definitely side-cropped to fit. MGM's compression job on the film is for the most part really good -- I spotted some artifacting here and there in a couple of scenes, but for a movie with this much motion they did a pretty solid job. See it on a really big TV (or better yet a 35mm theatrical print with digital sound) for the best effect.

I do agree that the audio is a bit murky. I think they took the audio from a 2-channel magnetic master and rechanneled it for 5.1, but they may have had to do this because of the elements available -- the audio in the movie contains atmospheric effects which are not duplicated in other copies of the soundtrack. I've not seen the private IRE edition of the DVD, so I can't comment on how good that is. But for the time being this is still a very worthy version of a movie that up until now simply wasn't available to the public in a commercial release.

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koyaanisqatsi
I saw this movie my senior year in highschool, back in 2002. I can honestly say that i have never been moved in such a way by a film as i have been by Koyaanisqatsi. It is unfortunate that so many people my age don't take time to seek out other things aside from whats on the surface of popular trends. The film is great because it lets you interpret it in any way you like. To me, it showed how nature is at a standstil in comparison to the constant move of human life and technology. Nature doesn't have to remodel or update every year to keep up with people. We have moved so high up above it we forget its there, and without it, we can't exist. I will say this, you have to have an open mind in order to truley appreciate this film. Otherwise it will blow right by you and you wont understand it.