KOYAANISQATSI: WHERE ARE YA AND WHATCHA DOING? (EXTENDED)

A different version of the article was published in the CBHS Literary Magazine (Volume I, Edition II) in December of 2022. The text below is an extended version of the same article, with two addendums and extra material scattered throughout.

November 13, 2022. Enunciate. Today is November the Thirteenth, Two-Thousand and Twenty-Two. November the Thirteenth, Two-Hundred and Two-Thousand and Twenty-Two. November the Thirteenth, Four-Billion Five-hundred and Forty-Three Million Two-Thousand and Twenty-Two. Humanity is not that old, it’s a well-known fact; Look it up. Throughout all that time we’ve accomplished so much, but where has that left us? “Us” in this sense is more than just you and me – friend/friend, reader/writer – it’s all of us, outside of this school outside of this neighborhood. It’s you, it’s me, it’s us. That’s the idea behind Koyaanisqatsi: the experimental documentary from 1982 brought to you by Francis Ford Coppola that takes the viewer on a journey throughout the expanse of a lifetime.

The name of the film comes from the language of the Hopi tribe of Northeastern Arizona, meaning “Life out of balance.” Throughout the 86-minute film, this concept is explored by an array of colorful shots of nature, people, cities, vehicles and the likes of it. There’s no dialogue, only a brilliantly impactful score by composer Philip Glass. An original soundtrack so esteemed, that songs from the Koyaanisqatsi score have been used in other projects, such as The Truman Show, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Stranger Things. Whether or not viewing films through a critical lens is your thing, most will be able to understand the motifs of the soundtrack which present themes of curiosity, beauty and hopelessness.

18 minutes into Koyaanisqatsi, the viewers witness their first glimpse of humanity, a farm tractor, which quickly becomes enshrouded in its own smoke – foreshadowing the incoming doom of humanity’s ambitions. After 18 minutes of nothing but impeccable nature, untouched landscapes of serenity which are then promptly interrupted by the presence of the machine. The soundtrack now shifts, taking a darker tone. As if the trilling tones of nature are now less inclined to reason. A man climbs out of the machine, walking around to the front before he is consumed by the dark smog of the tractor. The audience is then left with a shot of nothing but smoke, overpowering the man, the machine, and the field with its unbridled pollution. 12 minutes later, the mechanized farm life changes into a montage of controlled destruction. The demolition of desolate buildings is the quick way to clean up your own mess. Countless buildings that developers have built which end up abandoned, destroyed in a glorious blaze of fire. Viewers feel a shared sense of guilt for the development of the world. Even in 1982, director Godfrey Reggio knew that industrialization would continue to fuel such an irreparable divide from modesty and naturalism that we would begin to destroy ourselves. Throughout this montage, we see the same materials we’ve been seeing the entire film – and our entire lives – stone, glass, metal; Ideations of natural resources that have been twisted far far from their original form. Koyaanisqatsi is dripping in symbolism and metaphor, but more importantly, it impacts the viewer by connecting them to the world around them. It’s timeless, as even the depiction of society from 40 years ago is still accurate at displaying the world of 2022.

The sound continues with a redundant and whimsical tune, that often loops over similar scenes. One continuous song blending into each other, the Koyaanisqatsi score could be best described as the sound of curiosity. The intrigue into the natural world, and the discovery of the synthetic modern world. Both seen from the impartial alien perspective of the filmmakers, faithfully following the rules of documentary making. The curious thematic motif of the music is fitting for the gorgeous shots of nature that start off the movie, but as the scenes take a darker turn, showing massive crowds of people, and their faceless dedication to gambling with slot machines, the same music that once gave the impression of impeccable natural beauty now creates an off-putting and upsetting experience for the viewer.

I watched Koyaanisqatsi on November 13, 2022. I sat down and watched it all in one go. The film is advertised as “Non-narrative,” but that doesn’t mean it has no plot. It was said to open the viewer to the world around them, a world they’d “never really seen until now.” Next to me on the couch was my dog, Moe, and in front of me was my hand, holding my phone. I rarely watch movies all in one go anymore, I don’t have the stamina for it. And it’s even more rare for me to watch anything without going on my phone. We all do it. I used to be able to not do it. Not anymore. It’s really quite unfortunate, I’m disappointed in myself for it but at times I feel that I can’t blame myself. Some may find it ironic, that while watching a film about humanity’s disconnect from nature, most people will disconnect themselves from the film using a thin black square that has slowly begun to separate us from each other. I sound old, but it’s true in a sense that very little of what the word “Civilization” used to mean had bled into modern life. Our world is dominated by machines of our own creation. In Koyaanisqatsi, the speed at which the scenes were shot often varies. The gorgeous nature shots moved so slow and gracious that you could almost reach out and grab them, while the accelerated time-lapses of cars jammed in traffic, and patrons crowding into horse-betting centers go by so fast that they resemble a swarm of flies. However, there is one distinct difference between the globe of Koyaanisqatsi and the world of today (besides the fall of the USSR), and it’s that people still spent time together. Public areas were not yet invaded by technology, nobody was in their own little world. Everybody as seen in this film is living a life that as much as we hate to admit it is alien to us in 2022. A life well lived, or is it?

Watching the movie with Moe on the couch with me reminded me of a thought that I’d dealt with many times before, a thought like a stone in running water; what to do in the event of a catastrophe. Watching the movie, I couldn’t help but regret my entire life, and fear that something may be coming. Something that has always stuck with me is from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, when the protagonist and her husband are planning to escape the country, and have to complete the difficult task of killing their cat in their garage since they can’t leave it behind, and they can’t take it with them; a symbolic severing of their ties to their past life, as their world they now live is no longer the same country, and their own way out isn’t familiar either. What would I do? What would I have to do to my own pets? These thoughts have mellowed in my heads for the past three years ever since I read that book, its presence only growing as the threat of some terrible political or environmental disaster nears coastal Texas. However, the apocalypse will likely not be a quick and shocking disaster, rather it clearly already happening. It’s the slow devolution of political peace, and the continued poisoning of Mother Earth. The world is dying all around us, however most don’t care to care.

One hour and ten minutes in – like an essay – Koyaanisqatsi now reaches the bottom of the page, arriving at the footnotes. The small commentary. The discretions and the concessions. It’s the trickle down of an article, everything that wasn’t important enough to be included and fell to the bottom. Here we see the scorned of the earth. Fires ravaging homes and forests, sick people at the end of their rope, the impoverished trying to survive with nothing. People in the streets, the human aspect. These are the victims of industrialization. The martyrs of the world. There are people that could be dealing with this one house away, so to pursue this disconnect which the film criticizes is irresponsible. To have empathy is cruel, to have none is tragedy.

Interestingly enough, shots of people never focus on the end result of the journey. There are countless shots of people crossing roads, and driving cars or taking buses, but very few of where they’re going. Arguably, the filmmakers are saying that the amount time spent in daily routine is time wasted. Forty years after the movie was made, everything that these people thought was so important that they had to stress over and had to rush to arrive punctually at may no longer even exist. Koyaanisqatsi doesn’t blame people for it. So much of it seems like it can be our fault, but that’s not what the movie is really saying. Inversely, at an hour sixteen minutes, the film shows the slow ascent of a space shuttle, which is quickly engulfed in a ball of fire as it explodes from the inside out. The spacecraft, unknowably manned or unmanned then falls back to earth. As shown since the beginning of the film, the sky is the highest point on the earth, the highest we can see. Something so intangible, impossible to hold, yet possible to breach. A single shuttle someday carrying countless humans will expand the reach of humanity out past the sky and towards the cosmos. Escaping the earth, the globe, the world. Then the ship explodes. There’s no escape.

The message of Koyaanisqatsi is that we are too caught up in participating in the hyper, capitalist, gilded development societal hell around us that we don’t even try to focus on reconnecting with nature, ancestry, and community. The film ends with a prolonged shot of cave paintings, the same place the film started. The music is slowly stripped away until the viewer is left in silence. At this moment Moe laid down next to me, and the gentle hum of the A/C overwhelmed my senses. The film released its grasp on me, carefully dropping me back onto the couch I’d been lifted from an hour earlier. A harsh awakening. A strong shake back into the regular world around me. A return to regular life, the life everyone is so caught up in. So caught up in it, that we only need to stop for a second, one single moment, and look around. Smell the roses. We are who we are, but that doesn’t mean we have to conform to the world. Go out, appreciate nature, find what makes you happy. Humanity cannot reconnect with nature if you don’t.

ADDENDUM I: SUPREME

As part of the 2020 Fall/Winter collection, hype-beast and so-called “designer” brand Supreme released a series of merchandise with the Koyaanisqatsi logo, and a still from the title screen showing the title with its definition. There’s no way to look at this streetwear line and not see it as a gross abuse of the film, and a massive misunderstanding (or more likely, overlooking) of the film’s message. Supreme has been, for the longest time, a supposed mockery of the rampant consumerism of teenage boys trying to fit certain ideals of a street image. However, the brand’s intentions of mocking this lifestyle has consumed them and has become their true business model rather than them imitating it. The brand which promotes cheap manufacturing, steals designs from smaller companies, and sells unimportant yet branded regular objects to pissants with perms has the audacity to claim to support an ideology based on environmentalism and naturalism, and align themselves with a film about respecting indigenous cultures and regretting industrialization and globalization… okay.

ADDENDUM II: THE QATSI TRILOGY

Koyaanisqatsi is one of three movies that make up the Qatsi trilogy. The other two being Powwaqatsi: Life in Transformation, and Naqoyqatsi: Life as War. The root word -qatsi means ‘life’ in the Hopi language; the second film’s title is a neologism, or in other words, a brand-new, made-up word created by Reggio. While Koyaanisqatsi focused on the separation between humanity and nature caused by technology and mechanization, the following sequels expand that perspective into the little details that sink into our lives. Powwaqatsi focuses on the effects of industrialization in third world countries. How this has caused a divide traditional and global culture, and the struggles for acceptance, peace, and pride that these nations now undergo on a daily basis. Naqoyqatsi can be translated to “civilized killing” or “a life of killing each other.” Although all three films are experimental in nature – and pioneers of it at that – Naqoyqatsi is the most novel of the series. With no distinguishable plot and no direct message, the film is rather divided into three movements (as a symphony would have). The first detailing the philosophical place that numbers, the digital space, and digital reality have in the modern world; the second exploring the passionate love people hold for money, and its presence in the “game” that is life; lastly, movement three relates back to the title, and shows how life has become an unintelligible flurry of violence, digital consumption, and unbridled cultural expansion. Film 3 was finished and released in 2002, and the office in which the movie was being worked on was near the Twin Towers at the time of the 2001 9/11 attacks; this event shifted the direction the movie was taking, and gave the filmmakers a stronger faith in the message they were trying to portray, as perhaps it gave the audience too. The films of the Qatsi trilogy, as one reviewer put it, have a “terrible beauty” in their cinematography and themes, and I’d highly recommend you all watch them whenever you get a chance.