Koyaanisqatsi.
It's an Avant-Garde classic.
An 85 minute tone poem,
without a single character, or line of dialogue;
save for the chanted choral score.
[chanted] Koyaanisqatsi.
A Hopi word, meaning: "life out of balance."
A harrowing look at the awesome machinery of humanity, and the turmoil it brings to the world.
The endlessly complex array of grids - constant, guided motion to create incredible efficiency.
The grid is how we move. It's how we eat.
And it's how we play.
Godfrey Reggio's haunting masterpiece is...
kind of boring to watch now?
No, honestly! Oh, the photography's great.
If anything this film is a great platform for Ron Fricke's dazzling photography,
I mean, how- how do you get the moon to do that? Itj- WOW.
And, obviously the music's great.
Philip Glass' score is still soul-shaking in its carefully controlled droning.
It's - a futurist dirge.
But what if we took Philip Glass... and swapped him out?
In 1998, Madonna used the same imagery.
It's a fitting visual reference.
The song, like the movie, is about living a life that moves a bit too fast.
Huh.
Philip Glass saw these images of speeding traffic and wrote dark music fit for a Satanic ritual.
Madonna's saw it and wrote a bright song for a carefree night out clubbing.
Living a "life out of balance" looks fun, right?
It's like playing Pac-Man. I mean Pac-Man's fun, right?
Madonna's not the only one to riff on Reggio.
Mike Mills used the film to represent the 20th century in '20th Century Women'.
And in 'Watchmen', Zack Snyder used Philip Glass' music to tell another story about big scary modernism.
But for me, the biggest sign that Reggio's revolution was over, was this:
Last year, filmmaker, Jesse England posted this to his Vimeo account.
The original trailer for Koyaanisqatsi -
made entirely out of stock footage.
ENTIRELY.
The "life out of balance" is the stuff of Shutterstock.
'Course the most prolific artist to reuse Koyaanisqatsi was Reggio himself.
And the other two films in the Qatsi Trilogy.
They all used a lot of the same visual ideas.
Probably why neither of them reach the same level of fame as the first entry.
So, obviously it's not revolutionary now,
it's been decades since this movie came out, and any new idea will eventually become old, but-
still, it was revolutionary for its time, right?
Well...
So, was Koyaanisqatsi EVER revolutionary?
Well, here's a shot in Koyaanisqatsi...
and one from 'Midnight Cowboy', made 13 years earlier.
One from Koyaanisqatsi,
and one from 'West Side Story', made 21 years earlier.
Koyaanisqatsi has this provocative cut, from sausages -
to escalators.
And, here's a very similar cut in 'Modern Times', made 46 years earlier.
We may not have seen it presented in one place, in one film, but we've definitely seen these images before.
The whole concept of Koyaanisqatsi is old.
It goes back to the "city symphonies" of the 1920s;
proto-documentaries about the magnificence of the city in motion.
Last year I made a video about the most influential of these films:
Dziga Vertov's 'Man with a Movie Camera'.
There was something beautiful about the potential he sees in the camera.
He wrote of the camera's ability to show the world more perfectly than the human eye.
Able to show a greater truth.
So, he made a film not only about the city, but our ability to document the city.
A revelry in the mechanisms - industrial, social, and cinematic -
that make human life possible in an urban environment.
So, has anything changed?
What's the difference between Vertov's camera and Reggio's camera?
Well, scale.
'Cause 40 years after the city symphony, humanity got a much better look at itself.
Vertov wrote about the camera's ability to move beyond human limitations.
I wonder what he would have thought of the photos taken by NASA.
Of course other filmmakers used this idea before Reggio.
The idea of capturing a satellite's eye view of the world.
Filmmakers like Eva Szasz, who made this animation for the National Film Board of Canada in 1968.
And filmmakers like Charles and Ray Eames, who made this famous documentary short.
[clip] This square's a kilometre wide. 1000 metres. The distance a racing car can travel in 10 seconds.
And today, even Marvel nabbed the idea.
Vertov's Kino-Eye had finally gotten a god's eye view.
We take it for granted now, what with the ubiquity of Satellite imagery;
but, it's an important leap.
With this new sense of scale, we couldn't make a city symphony.
We had to make a global one.
But it still serves the same purpose:
A grandiose autograph. Big ol' expensive selfie.
And honestly our self-image hasn't changed much.
Here's a Soviet Sci-Fi film;
where a character looks at the world through a screen, and she sees something like a Vertov movie.
[clip] This is the world that you know.
75 years later, in an American Sci-Fi film, another character looks at the world through another screen,
and he sees a Reggio movie.
Same genre, same purpose.
[clip] You've been... living in a dream world, Neo.
Reggio's often said that the meaning of the film was up to the viewer, but-
come on.
That dirge of a score.
That menacing shot of factory towers after the relative serenity of the shots of unspoiled nature.
The fact that he bothered to translate the title as "a way of life that calls for another way of living".
How can this not be read as a damnation of the effects of globalization?
I'll tell you how.
When "Life out of Balance", becomes simply:
Life.
Turns out if you see an image often enough, in enough context and are told "this is the world",
you start to think that this is the world.
Not only that, it is all possible worlds.
Maybe the only possible world.
Reggio shows us grids and speed; endless matrices of organised humanity.
Just as how circuitry beautifully organises information, so our cities beautifully organise humans.
So instead of being a damnation of global capitalism, it makes it seem...
Efficient.
Frictionless.
Natural, in its own way.
How can it be wrong if it works so well?
A phrase comes to mind: "truth-game".
We are shown the world, as it operates, and therefore we normalise it.
We accept the rules of the game and keep playing.
That's why I think that stock footage recut is so damning.
Reggio's imagery isn't just not shocking, it's FILLER.
It's the stuff of corporate videos, of PowerPoint presentations.
Like the entire industrialised world heard its critics, heard them cry out,
"The system dehumanizes! The system pollutes! The system only consumes,
defecates, then consumes again!"
And the industrialized world said:
"Yeah."
"Isn't it awesome?"
This is what Foucault meant when he wrote about the "regime of truth".
What Thatcher meant by "there is no alternative".
What Fukuyama believed when he declared "the end of history".
Koyaanisqatsi, intentionally or not,
is one of the greatest texts of neo-liberalism in the last half-century.
But there's one sequence in the film that I still think is brilliant, and it's one of the least flashy.
It's this simple little scene.
A man gets the elevator,
someone stops it for him,
the elevator goes up,
and another man laughs off the indignity of missing his ride.
We've all been there, right?
An every day mini-drama.
The kind of thing that you would miss if you viewed the world in fast-motion.
Reggio gave his movie his own criticism.
We are not blobs of light streaking down highways. We are not buzzing little blobs on a street.
We are not sausages. We are not a set of pixels.
We're still people.
And all the complexities and indignities that entails.
Seen from a satellite...
we might miss that.