Reviews
DVD Savant, Sep.
14, 2002
Film Review
Koyaanisqatsi
and Powqqatsi DVD Review
Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant
Starting with the Santa Fe - based Institute for Regional Education,
ex-monk Godfrey Reggio embarked on a cinematic journey to put his
New Age pantheistic humanism on film. Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi
are plotless documentaries driven by intense Philip Glass music
scores; both dazzle in slightly different ways. Starting as a film-festival
hit, the first of the trilogy wowed the light-show freaks with its
kaleidoscopic timelapse photograpy, blending boiling cloudscapes
and speeding city traffic into hypnotic patterns. Powaqqatsi was
more organic but slowed itself to a meditative crawl, and won fewer
worshippers. Coming soon is Naqoyqatsi, a third part of the trilogy
that, by the looks of the trailer included on these discs, is even
more chaotic and disturbing.
These are two separate DVD releases.
Koyaanisqatsi
MGM Home Entertainment 1983 / color / 1:78 anamorphic
16:9 / 87 m. / Life Out of Balance / Street Date September 17, 2002
/ $19.98 Cinematography Ron Fricke, Louis Schwartzberg
Film Editors Ron Fricke, Alton Walpole
Original Music Philip Glass
Written by Ron Fricke, Michael Hoenig, Godfrey Reggio and Alton
Walpole Produced by Francis Ford Coppola, Mel Lawrence, Roger McNew,
T. Michael Powers, Godfrey Reggio, Lawrence Taub, Alton Walpole
Directed by Godfrey Reggio
Synopsis
The natural wonders of our world are contrasted with its technological
marvels, in this cinematic document of the manic world of the 'Northern'
hemisphere, with its artificial consumer world of mass marketed
products and cities that hum with the energy of millions of lights
and thousands of vehicles. Somewhere in this screaming hive, human
beings strive to remain human ...
The Center Cannot Hold
One of the most desired titles on DVD, Koyaanisqatsi has been out
of print on a fuzzy, flat VHS for almost twelve years. The light-'em-if-you-got'em
film fans who smoked up screenings of 2001 and Fantasia went nuts
over this wordless, seamless 87 minutes of boiling clouds, blurred
freeway traffic and hallucinogenic views of Las Vegas, open pit
mines, a Hostess Twinkie assembly line, and every scenic wonder
in the great West. A lot of the film is done with time-lapse photography,
which speeds up action by taking only a frame or so a second, instead
of 24 each second. In my editorial circles, we therefore call it
TimeLapsesqatsi.
The emphasis here is on technology - things, machines, vehicles,
rockets, and a lot of the footage is from stock libraries, particularly
Louis Schwartzberg's Energy Productions, who had an ad in Daily
Variety each week for twenty years. Atom bombs explode and rockets
surge skyward, and we hold on the stock shots longer than usual,
making them seem all the more strange.
Hypnotic repetition patterns are built into the music, and much
of what we see is cyclical or repetitive as well - the hot dogs
coming out of a meat processing machine, traffic surging in cyclic
fits in New York. When we see human faces, it's a relief, although
many of them are just pedestrians in motion, dwarfed and dominated
by the activity around them. The poetry of Alphaville with its talk
of the city as a huge breathing ant hive, has become reality. And
like Alphaville, the nightime cities with their traffic represented
by unbroken rivers of streaked, streaking headlights seem to exist
in some other temporal dimension.
The absence of voiceover or other overt messages causes us to concentrate
on the visual patterns and become, perhaps, absorbed by them. Encouraged
by the sussuring Glass rhythms, it's easy to imagine Koyaanisqatsi
as one long, unbroken meditation on the modern world. Godfrey Reggio
is basically a modern guru. His Institute for Regional Education
commercials and short subjects were overtly subversive, but all
messages are sublimated here.
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MGM's DVD of Koyaanisqatsi is an immaculate transfer where even
the sometimes grainy stock footage is curried and combed to perfection.
The disc's best feature is the Greg Carson-produced interview-docu
with Reggio and Glass. The composer comes off as an earnest collaborator
who marvels at the creative freedom they had to rescore and recut
sections of the film until both were satisfied. Reggio's interview
is self-described as a 'rave' and resembles nothing less than a
slightly subdued version of Dennis Hopper's character in Apocalypse
Now. You get the feeling that Reggio lets loose with twenty-minute
monologues like this at the drop of a hat. With almost perfect diction,
excellent speaking skills and nary an 'umm' or 'ahh', he rattles
off about 1000 observations, descriptions and comparisons relating
to his film in record time, never breaking his stance of enlightened
enthusiasm. He starts with the use of a Hopi word for the title
and goes from there. The docu should be seen after the feature,
so as not to dull the impact of some of the visuals, but it will
really be an asset to Koyaanisqatsi fans seeking more insight into
this remarkable artist.
Powaqqatsi
MGM Home Entertainment 1988 / color / 1:78 anamorphic 16:9 / 97
m. / Life in Transformation / Street Date September 17, 2002 / $19.98
Cinematography Graham Berry, Leonidas Zourdoumis
Film Editors Iris Cahn, Miroslav Janek, Alton Walpole
Original Music Philip Glass
Written by Godfrey Reggio and Ken Richards
Produced by Shyam Benegal, Mandeep Kakkar, Mel Lawrence, Kurt Munkacsi,
Godfrey Reggio, Lawrence Taub
Directed by Godfrey Reggio
Presented by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas
If Koyaanisqatsi is TimeLapsesqatsi, then Powaqqatsi should be called
SlowMo-sqatsi. Less popular (but preferred by Savant) mainly because
of its non-distribution by an uncomprehending Cannon Films, Powaqqatsi
consists almost completely of new photography of indigenous people
going about their real lives. Shot for shot, it has more remarkable
and original footage than its predecessor. The visual poetry has
a tendency to become precious - one silhouette of a wise man with
a staff is rather annoying - or to show the politics of its makers,
but this followup film has a strong emotional impact to add to the
first installment's intellectual headiness.
Synopsis
Starting with a horrifying glimpse into the living hell of a Brazilian
gold mine, where thousands of men toil like ants to haul sacks of
mud up out of a huge open pit, this examination of the roots of
human civilization starts in natural agrarian societies, moves to
indigenous townships and groupings, and then jumps 'ahead' to show
the same societies dwarfed, brutalized and enslaved by the modern
economics and technology of the industrialized world. People live
in garbage and work under inhuman conditions while antiseptic skyscrapers
are built around them; invisible radio waves blanket the globe with
advertising & propaganda, while resources are stolen and replaced
with mountains of pollutants. Yet the spiritual in man, represented
by the Islamic call to prayer and the undying faith of Hindus in
India, persists ...
The First World Feeds on the Third
Powaqqatsi celebrates humans over technology and has a warmth that
the first film lacks. There are dozens of beautiful faces in this
show - kids, men, women, and wizened oldsters of every race and
origin. We see them at work, happily at first. There is a section
in the first third where every cut, from a circle of women threshing
wheat to the spinning skirts of an Andean dancer, is so beautiful
one cannot help but exclaim out loud. Man is shown to be able to
live practically anywhere: crammed into stilt houses around any
body of water, on remote islands, in the middle of deserts and on
the tops of mountains. An Indian mud village, with its painted stucco
walls, is orange and immaculate-looking; the ritual costumes of
Africans, Indians, and Andeans become a collage of color and diversity
and pride.
The imagery is then subverted by the ugliness of modern reality,
with its endless ore-cars, regimented native troops, grim and grimy
sweatshops, and roads shared by vehicular traffic and barefoot,
rickety-legged men with impossible loads on their backs. There are
images here that burn into the memory: a kid who couldn't be more
than seven beating the ox that pulls his huge cart, while his father
tries to rest beside him. Tons of rocks and garbage pour into a
bay, possibly being dumped as landfill. A hundred toothpicks sticking
out of an abstract grid are revealed to be a sideways shot of laundry
hung from highrise windows, as a jet passes at an impossible angle.
A kid in Hong Kong marvels at the beauty of dozens of superimposed
neon signs. A brief shot of soot-covered men carrying heavy loads
up soot-covered stairs in a hellish, smoking work yard is a more
potent image of brute labor than anything in Metropolis. Television
is reduced to a constantly morphing display of commercial goods,
rapturous faces, and violent weapons, becoming the Hopi Powaqq -
an evil, seducing sorcerer that sucks the lifeforce of other entities
to further its own life.
Unlike the abstract Koyaanisqatsi, opposing content is used to form
new meanings and messages with a decided political intent. The author's
contrast of victims and oppressors becomes all too clear and rather
strident here, with blasts of music accompanying huge closeups of
'oppressed' men staring down the camera with accusing, bitter eyes.
One little black boy holds up two fists defiantly, but trembles
- with fear?. A bejeweled woman in a sari holds her child and gazes
seemingly right into our souls.
A very spiritual man, Reggio concludes Powaqqatsi with an extended
lento passage, returning to natural images, especially water, to
end on an endorsement of faith as the true center of human value.
The face of a toothless shaman, smiling in rapture, mixes with the
almost perfect reflections in an Indian river. It's a return to
calm and peace that becomes a visual meditation on the fate of mankind.
Whether the show's theme is an oversimplification is debatable ...
other minds would argue that the idyllic lifestyles of primitive
peoples were long ago spoiled by overpopulation, disease, war and
slavery, without benefit of modern technology. And there's plenty
of arguments for man's spiritual diversity being warped into fundamentalist
oppression. Powaqqatsi is a poem, not a coherent political treatise.
Powaqqatsi is perhaps the highpoint of Philip Glass' musical output.
The score isn't dominated by hypnotic synthesizer noodlings and
weird dissonant Invaders from Mars-like choral effects. There's
instead a whole range of music stylings, much of it suggested by
rhythms and instruments from the Third World, and often rising to
a pitch that drives the images on screen instead of simply accompanying
them .
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Powaqqatsi looks even better than its predecessor because so much
of it is pristine original footage shot by high speed cameras. MGM's
generous compression brings it all out in breathtaking detail and
sparkling color. Sometimes we wish there were optional subtitles
saying where individual shots were filmed, as scenes jump from continent
to continent with abandon. It's like 50 volumes of National Geographic
images, arranged as that company would never arrange them. Godfrey
Reggio is again fascinating in his 'raving', and it's best to just
listen and let his ideas flow over you than to try and decipher
each phrase as you hear it - You don't talk to Godfrey, man, you
listen to him. He doesn't stress the relationship, but this is clearly
the work of a man of faith: he says his dozen or so years in a monastery
ended decades ago, but that's still the man he is.
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Both discs have a new trailer for Naqoyqatsi, a phantasmagoria of
altered images that would probably be dubbed Digi-sqatsi by my old
editorial crew. This one means 'War as a style of life', and promises
to be more controversial (and welcome) even than Powaqqatsi. The
trailers for the first two films are on both discs as well.
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There's a website for the Institute
for Regional Education, the producers of the -Qatsi trilogy,
with info on the new release, with more information about Godfrey
Reggio and his films. www.koyaanisqatsi.org
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On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Koyaanisqatsi rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Interview docu, trailers
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: September 14, 2002
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On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Powaqqatsi rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Interview docu, trailers
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: September 14, 2002
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Footnotes: 1. While at Cannon, Savant cut the trailer for Powaqqatsi,
a plum assignment that got me out of the Penitentiary 3 quality
ghetto when Godfrey Reggio insisted that the cutter of an earlier
promo for the film (then called North/South: Powaqqatsi) be given
the trailer. That put me ahead of 3 or four senior cutters who wanted
the project. Reggio visited for twenty minutes to criticize my first
cut, which for him was 'too pretty', too musical, and too 'Film
Board of Canada.' After a solid fifteen minutes of the thickest
graduate-film student lingo I'd ever heard (Reggio lives and breathes
that stuff) I got the message - make the trailer less rythmical
and less closely tailored to the music track (which was one heck
of a difficult music cutting job). The Powaqqatsi trailer was shown
almost nowhere, but graced the front of the old VHS release. I hustled
an article on my trailer in Adweek (how do you sell a movie with
no stars, no plot, no commercial hook?), a self-promotional coup
that sprung me from the sinking ship that was Cannon, and into my
first real trailer boutique job, cutting a 70mm advance distributors'
promo for The Abyss ... ahh, one doesn't remember the long stretches
of unemployment, just the good times. MGM had no copy of the trailer,
so I loaned them my stereophonic copy on video for the DVD.
DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2002 Glenn Erickson
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