I was a teenager riding a bicycle through a neighborhood, when I came across a yard sale. Heard that someone had died. Among their things was a tape of the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack composed by Philip Glass. Bought it for a couple of bucks, and later that night was blown away by the music. I had heard nothing like it before - it made me shiver with awe and fear. It felt like the dead was reaching out through the sounds. A few years later I watched the film and had a vision of the monstrous beauty, this ancient swarming organism called humanity, of which I'm like a finger or toe, a leaf and flower. Hard to describe the influence this film has had on my view of the world, and what art can do to you - even now it gives me goose bumps remembering that aesthetic experience in my youth.
If you haven't already, I'd encourage you to check out some of Philip Glass's other soundtracks. One I like in particular is The Illusionist.
There's also a very short video game OST of a game called Splice [0], [1] that coincidentally I'm listening to right now which is very similar to Glass's music. My playcount on each of the tracks is literally over 1000, and my playcount on the first track is over 2000 (getting close to 2500 now) because once I didn't notice I had it on loop(1) rather than loop(all) for several days.
It's the only music I'm able to listen to when I have a mild migraine, although when the headache gets bad I require absolute silence.
It was pretty magical. This was 2003 (20 years ago then) in a massive soviet-era concert hall.
It was the first time it saw the film and the live aspect left me a lot of questions whether this is somehow a completely different experience from the actual film.
I've since watched it at home many times and the live-band aspect is obviously immense but the music was pretty close to the film.
I attended the press conference as well and one of his answers really struck me.
He was asked about how he composes film scores and his answer included something along the lines: "I only compose based on the script, I never watch any of the footage before the composition is finished."
I had a similiar experience watching Baraka as a young teen. It had felt like Humanity was some kind of mecanism propelling forward, and I was a tiny gear.
The article is a moving tribute to the power of Reggio's vision and the brilliance of Glass' score.
I was living in Santa Fe in the '70s and was at that first screening, it was the world premier, at the Lensic Theater. I still have the stub. I was there because Godfrey Reggio came into the sandwich shop I was a partner in and because I was friends of friends of some of the guys on the camera crews shooting footage in the Southwest and working with Alton.
I recall it as a pivotal moment of my 22 year old life. It was like nothing I'd experienced. The lack of 'anything happening' lasted a few minutes. But I recall starting to 'get' the symbolism and the narrative the images convey. Much like the author I was floored by the music. I was a prog rock fan with an appreciation for classical music. Well, Beethoven at least, so the concept of a long form piece was engaging. The epic sweep of the imagery and music gripped me and held my attention throughout. Since then many of those images have come to mind at various times. And the final sequence of the Saturn V leaving the launch pad in slow motion coupled with the beautiful, haunting score to it blew me away in the moment and I can still recall its impact now.
Koyaanisqatsi is a rare work of art. The article brings me hope. The world is quite fucked up right now and while it's completely possible for us, all of us, to change things to mitigate the situations there is little cause to believe that will actually happen. Then I come across someone articulating such a profound resonance with a work actually closer to 50 years old and it sparks that hope.
About 10 years ago I went to a lecture in Santa Fe by Reggio where he talked about the movie, screened it, and answered questions after. 10 years before that I saw Glass perform the music in Albuquerque with his orchestra while the movie played on a big screen above. At that point I had watched the movie perhaps 100 times. To say I am a huge fan is an understatement.
The overwhelming impression I got from Reggio and Glass was that they didn't so much create the experience as give birth to it. Of course they both intended to create something great, but I think the movie's success as a cultural artifact exceeded their wildest expectations.
There are very few movies I care to watch more than once. There are even fewer that will still be watched and studied 10,000 years from now (assuming we survive that long). Koyaanisqatsi is one of them.
The movie is powerful enough and the subject relevant enough to still resonate with the younger generation. I do wonder, however, if the older the movie gets, the more distant the imagery from the seventies might intuitively appear to a young viewer. This led me to think about how the movie would look if (re)made today. I keep getting ideas for recent footage / subjects which would work in place of the original shots, whatever the merit of such an undertaking might be.
Samsara is pretty great as well, mostly because of the impeccable cinematography and shelling out for 70mm film and lugging cameras and lenses which film in 70mm around the world.
Ron Fricke is person who made Koyaanisqatsi the beautiful visual journey that it is. I would recommend watching any of his other works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Fricke
(FWIW, Powaqqatsi is also pretty good, but I would strongly suggest avoiding Naqoyqatsi which is just not very good).
In addition to Baraka and especially Samsara (the best known film in this genre), I'd suggest the films of Nikolaus Geyrhalter. "Our Daily Bread" is a really good film looking at food production specifically.
Thanks for sharing. Baraka is one of my favorite movies and one the the very few Bluray disks I actually own. It was one of the last movies to be shot entirely in 70mm[0]. At the time Ebert declared it the finest video disk ever made[1]. There was a recent 8K reissue of Baraka, but I have not seen it.
I think the aesthetic of Koyaanisqatsi had a large effect of on film aesthetics.
Breaking Bad's best scenes IMO were the Timelapses which I found very reminiscent Koyaanisqatsi.
> Koyaanisqatsi might be more important in cinematic history, but Baraka is actually enjoyable to watch.
To each his own. I'm not sure I'd call watching Koyaanisqatsi exactly "enjoyable" (that sounds like it's cheapening the experience), but I've seen it at least 5 times.
Back in the 90s a bunch of us watched the whole movie by accident. Somehow it came up in conversation and the guy whose house we were in happened to have a copy on VHS and he put it in and we got so mesmerized that while we only intended to watch a few minutes of it, we watched the whole thing.
There are two “sequels” to Koyaanisqatsi: Powisqatsi and Naqoyqatsi, both also with Philip Glass soundtracks.
I hugely prefer Koy to Baraka, but the world takes all sorts. Baraka just feels like a lot of nice vignettes in random sequence. Koy walks through themes, builds upon them, then repeats them. It's more like a symphony.
The film was shot and framed in 4:3 but was cropped down (for reasons unknown to me) into widescreen for the theatrical and later the Blu-ray releases.
There is a rare uncropped DVD release of it by a distributor called "IRE" out there. My understanding is that every copy of this release is autographed by the director, if you need some proof of artistic intent. AFAIK there's no definitive proof that this isn't just "open matte", but IMO the superiority of this release is pretty clear. You can find it on public torrent sites.
Does anyone have any information on the Hopi prophecies quoted in the article and in the film? Are they documented elsewhere? It seems a little suspicious to me that the Hopi text so closely matches 1970s American environmentalism/anxiety about nuclear weapons. I suspect there has been some creative translation.
I actually wrote to the linguist listed in the Koyaanisqatsi credits for the original text in Hopi and he said he couldn't find it....
Thanks for the rabbit hole! If the wikipedia citations are reliable, you might check all three of:
Christopher Vecsey. The Emergence of the Hopi People, in American Indian Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 3, American Indian Religions, 70 (Summer 1983).
Harold Courlander. The Fourth World of the Hopis: The Epic Story of the Hopi Indians as Preserved in their Legends and Traditions, 201 University of New Mexico Press, 1987
Susan E. James. "Some Aspects of the Aztec Religion in the Hopi Kachina Cult", Journal of the Southwest (2000)
In particular, the wiki article [1] cites the first to claim, “Hopi mythology is not always told consistently and each Hopi mesa, or even each village, may have its own version of a particular story” which would presumably provide ample opportunities to walk in the gray area between quoting and creative translation you mention.
In addition to that angle, the Palo Verde nuclear plant broke ground in 1976 [2] so it’s not ridiculous to think that the public might have been concerned and discussing it around 1972 when some of the first film was taken. No citation there but not would be another avenue to investigate.
Tough to say without being Hopi. There are many things they cannot share unless you’re Hopi. Same with other tribes. Curious, what did the linguist say exactly?
Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad-Gita to describe witnessing/pulling off the first atomic detonation. I'd say that it was the first time that humanity actually controlled a godlike power, but gods and prophecies of apocalypse have long been a feature of religion. And it hardly seems surprising that native people would take issue with despoiling the land.
> This episode of [Hopi] existence begins with the extraordinarily cruel act of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 by the United States’ Air Force, near the end of World War II. Among the remote consequences of this attack, one or two years later, a group of Hopi of the Second Mesa at their ceremonial reunions (kivas) started “equating the atomic bomb with a prophetic story about a gourd of ashes which brought destruction when it was cast on the ground,” according to anthropologist Brian D. Haley. By 1948, with the devastation of planet Earth in mind because of human greed, elders and religious leaders of the Second and Third Mesa decided it was urgent to share this prophecy with the “White people” so that everyone could be prepared for Purification Day, the moment when deity of the current fourth world, Maasaw, would come and redeem humanity, creating a new paradise on Earth.
> The effort to spread the word on the ancient prophecies is what anthropologist Richard Clemmer designated the “Hopi Traditionalist Movement.” The Hopi agenda, though, was more than a spiritual calling; it was very political. In 1949 they sent President Truman a letter in which they detailed their prophecies and message of awareness, but also their position about land ownership, mineral extraction permits, the cultural and political rights of indigenous peoples, and pending US policies. With the help of non-Native People, the movement got the attention of conscientious objectors and draft resisters of the Second World War, pacifists, anarchists, spiritual radicals, and, in time, the different counterculture circles of the 1950s, 60s and 70s ...
> It’s the mid 1970s and Godfrey Reggio does not have a name for the film he is shooting. His co-workers are telling him they are not going to get distribution or financial aid if he does not name it. Reggio had resisted to do so until then, because for him the images were the message. Persuaded, he starts searching for a word “with no cultural baggage, a new word to describe the world.” ...
> Living in Santa Fe, Reggio was near the Hopi reservation and had friends that were “Hopi devotees,” as he calls them. They insisted on the connections between his creative project and the Traditional Hopi Movement’s prophecies. He met David Monongye, one of the Hopi spokesmen of Hotevilla, by giving him a ride from the reservation to a doctor’s appointment and they became friends. Reggio liked the idea of naming his film with an originally non-written language to evoke his argument that the literate culture he lived in was no longer a good describer for the insanity he saw all around. Thus, he contacted the linguist Ekkehart Malotki, who knew the Hopi language, and his Hopi co-worker Michael Lomatuway’ma. They introduced him to the word koyaanisqatsi, a concept that nailed his awareness. Reggio went to David Monongye for permission. “David said it’s an ancient word,” recalls Reggio today, “a word that’s not in popular use. He didn’t talk much about it, but he said the definition we had, took the meaning of the word.” ...
> Reggio not only asked for Monongye’s opinion, he also went through two more examinations by clan leaders of other villages: first by Mina Lansa, the traditional leader of Old Oraibi, and her husband John, then by a group of members of the 2nd Mesa. Reggio felt as he had gone through an ecclesiastical interrogation once again, and in a language he couldn’t understand, but with better results. All of them gave him consent.
My kids (age 3 and 5) wanted to watch a movie and I didn't really want them watching one so I bluffed and put on Koyaanisqatsi. They (and I, for the first time in ~15 years) were enthralled. Ended up talking about poverty, etc.
Some people think of the qatsi trilogy, Baraka, Samsara, Chronos, Visitors, etc. as documentaries without words, or just pretty pictures and music.
I think of them as audiovisual essays. They're not just a delight for the senses. Each of these films says things. They cut unexpected subjects together in comparisons that speak about the human condition. They use music queues to force new interpretations of familiar settings. The qatsi trilogy uses those hopi sayings to set your mind on rails and then the visuals and music propel you on a roller coaster of emotion, but Fricke's films dispense with the rails and simply let you draw your own meaning. That meaning changes a little every time you watch the films.
These are films that invite you to create your own interpretation. You are invited to watch them with an active mind, always looking for new details, correlations, and how they fit together. This is totally unlike a documentary whose narrator tells you what to think. Here you are not being taught, but invited to teach yourself.
Give these films a chance if you've never watched them. They are uniquely rewarding.
I can recommend watching the entire film run backwards. The music sounds approximately the same, and it turns it into a feel-good story showing assembly lines pulling cars apart, pollution being sucked into factories and mining vehicles burying ores.
So I read the article having never heard of this before and then looked it up on YouTube.
Having not watched it the right way round. It does kind of change the narrative.
It kind of felt like society was disassembling itself, regressing which is sad in itself, but it was for a good reason?
Also as an aside it was the clearest look I've seen into what everyday like was like in the 80s having not been alive at the time in a way that hasn't been glossed over like the media we consume.
I've tried a couple times to coerce my kids into watching Koyaanisqatsi (one of them really likes watching "the way things go" so it isn't an absurd reach).
I keep landing on that video rather than the "proper" one and it's disconcerting.
Interesting. One of the few movies you can fully watch in both directions. The music character makes the distinct atmosphere.
I just made a small peek and I could find new some visual details, which I was glossing over on the forward version. (e.g. explosions in the windows of the demolished buildings)
Jeez still gets my heart pumping - watched just 3 minutes (0:45:00 -> 0:48:00 where it does the 'cars flowing like blood through veins in a city) and the real human orchestra music just nails it.
The composition of the shots makes me ask, Why are we living this way? Good and bad outcomes, ofc, and the film makes me ask myself questions.
Seeing this post/thread brings back some good memories!
Am happy to see Phillip Glass is on Bandcamp. I found an old cassette copy of Koyaanisqatsi kicking around but also just got a digital copy of the soundtrack there; happy to support a living artist.
Koyaanisqatsi is just one of those Magic films that you can start watching and think yeah whatever - and then as it goes on and on you just get more and more blown away by incredible intensity of the soundtrack and visuals. A really transcendental experience.
The backstory that Philip Glass originally didn’t want to score it is also amazing, as is the reason for Francis Ford Coppola’s name being on the artwork even though he had nothing to do with the film.
> Francis Ford Coppola’s name being on the artwork even though he had nothing to do with the film.
Sounds like a strange take. From [1]:
> Koyaanisqatsi opens with the words “Presented by Francis Ford Coppola.” This simple endorsement by one of cinema’s most renowned directors solidified the film’s reputation and propelled it into movie theaters around the world.
Not sure if FFC gave them money (I guess yes since he's credited as executive producer), even without money, his name would've been enough to open a lot of doors.
Reminds of how Werner Herzog got involved in "The Act of Killing" [2], watching an 8-minute excerpt at breakfast was enough.
From what I understood, he simply endorsed the film to help it get a wider audience. He didn't produce, direct, or have an involvement with the making of the film. That's what I meant.
Producers, executive or otherwise, are usually involved in financing the film before and during its production. This didn't happen. He saw it after production and felt compelled to help spread the message.
I think it's great that he did, but it's surely one of those weird artefacts of why Koyaanisqatsi is successful.
It's remarkably difficult to find sources seeing as searching for 'Koyaanisqatsi' and 'Philip Glass' brings up a ton of renditions!
But the story goes something like this: He turned down the request to score the film, because he didn't consider himself a composer of film scores. So, the director went and got a load of Philip Glass music and overlaid it on the film himself and sent it to Glass. Once he saw it, he was in.
Nothing particularly mind-blowing in terms of a tale of how the film got made, but it could have easily gone in a completely different direction and not be the film we know.
"If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster."
"Near the day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky."
"A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans."
This movie is incredible. To many people, its lack of characters and a traditional storyline makes it alienating and boring, but there’s such a deep beauty embedded within that. There might not be a story, but there is a narrative that is clearly commenting about our relationship to nature, and in lacking those traditional elements of mainstream cinema it exposes us to a new way of thinking. We see life on earth taken at face value; the scenes are familiar to us but without any characters or words to ground and bias us. I’ve always felt that its as close as we can get to observing earth for the first time from a distant place. It forces us to detach from all the basic axioms that fuel our day to day experience, and in doing so makes an extremely salient point about our societies relationship with nature. Paired with the words « life out of balance », its hard to complete a viewing without a sense of dread that we’re doing a wildly bad job of taking care of our planet.
One of my favorite films of all time, and still relevant today. As a young person it totally altered my view of time and humanity.
Subsequent viewings have always revealed new interpretations as my life and surroundings changed. I think on the dvd director’s commentary the director said something to this effect, how so many people he spoke with had completely takes on what the movie was about.
Also part of the magic of the film was the active collaboration between Glass and Reggio as it was being filmed and re-cut; the music and the cinematography are inseparable.
I remember coming out of the cinema completely mesmerized. A but like reading poetry when you cannot express why it touches you.
I watched quite a few experimental films and some can be long after only 5 minutes. Koyaanisqatsi on the other hand feels completely coherent and keeps its tension for 90 minutes even if I couldn’t re-tell the story.
There's a fantastic post-rock cover of the film's best-known song (Prophecies) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwolSFreL3M . I can't find anything about this band but I love this version of it.
A few years ago I saw go go penguin perform their imagining of the koyaanisqatsi soundtrack live. It was one of the best things I've ever seen. I was spellbound from start to finish.
I’m thinking that the performance that I saw had the PGE plus the Hollywood Bowl symphony playing live to the movie, but I could be misremembering it and the symphony may have played other material with the PGE before or after the movie.
I saw PGE and the LA Philharmonic performing live with the movie in 2009 at the Hollywood Bowl, and they also performed other pieces, so you're likely remembering correctly.
I used to watch Koyaanisqatsi in the Valhalla, an "encore" cinema in Glebe (Sydney, Australia). This, and Spinal Tap, and 2001. Oh, and A Clockwork Orange. This is back when VHS players were a luxury item, and seeing old movies was difficult or impossible. The Valhalla also ran controversial new movies, which usually meant gay themed like My Beautiful Laundrette, which mainstream cinemas would not touch.
The Valhalla published 3 month (or 6 month, I don't remember now) calendars that were about the size of a tabloid double-page spread. They were a common sight on fridge doors.
>...an advertising campaign for the American Civil Liberties Union involving invasions of privacy and the use of technology to control behaviour... ...The campaign was popular enough to remove Ritalin from being used in New Mexico schools
Um, what? And I'm sure that was great for the kids who needed their ADHD treated.
Does anyone know if either the iTunes or Vudu digital HD versions are from the Criteron Bluray versions, or just upscaled “HD” from MGM? I’m suspect of the quality that I might get if I buy the digital versions vs just shelling out for the Qatsi Bluray Criterion trilogy (I know that physical is always leaps and bounds better than streaming digital but that is not what this question is about).
Its interesting that he mentioned that mentioned that the music was used in Stranger Things, season 4. Season 3 used music from Glass's opera Satyagraha, Season 4 (at least in the scene I remember) starts the Koyaaniqatsi music but subtly transitions to music from Glass's opera Akhnaten. They're both exposition scenes where the bad guy explains what he's doing or his world view.
I thought the music was particularly effective in those scenes. Clearly there is a Philip Glass fan on that show.
Funny story, we wanted to watch it recently and found it streaming online somewhere. Unbeknownst to us, it was in reverse, presumably to avoid copyright infringement/getting caught. But there was no mention of it in the description so we had no idea and watched it beginning to end, or rather, end to beginning. After a while I was wondering why nothing I'd read about it mentioned the very interesting artistic choice to play all the footage backwards. The famous music was also istaqsinaayok but I thought maybe after a little while it would switch. It didn't but by then it seemed perverse not to continue. It's really quite poignant in reverse, i recommend it!
While this movie is great and everything the author says rings true, I must be honest and say for me the movie that floored me more was Baraka. It’s just…astonishing, mesmorising, dumbfounding? I can’t put into words now this movie makes me feel
Surely, we still live in a life out of balance. But something about how digital much of human life and industry is now makes it seemingly difficult to create a modern successor to Koyaanisqatsi. I suppose you could just have a panning shot across massive server farms and maybe some footage evoking the sheer amount of carbon and water requires for these operations, but not sure it translates to film in the same powerful way as other footage in films like Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka, and the most recent film along these lines that I have seen, Anthropocene (2018).
Hundreds of people in public spaces all sliding their fingers on algorithmically controlled touch screens (and oblivious of each other) would make another shot. A scene of a roomful of people all wearing VR goggles while some "coordinator" walks around would be the climactic transition scene.
What is incredible is that in the four decades since Koyaanisqatsi the imbalance has only gotten worse and there is no evidence that some equilibrium will ever be reached.
The soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi is also used in the opening scene of Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (2013), which pairs a deep feeling of foreboding over footage of the beaches of Norfolk.
While it might appear to be an incongruous choice to open a comedy film, I note that Koyaanisqatsi, Watchmen (book and film) and Alan Partridge are all works primarily concerned with whether it is in our own nature to destroy ourselves, and whether we might deserve it.
I first watched this film back at a time when sustainability was not discussed widely as an emerging crisis. It resonated deeply yet it was somehow disconnected from the day-to-day struggle of living a life.
As the years passed and more and more we have come around to see the dead-ends of our ways, that original disconnect has been finally resolved: the movie was just way ahead of its time.
A high school near where I lived at the time (southern New Jersey) created a mural in the cafeteria inspired by, and titled, Koyaanisqatsi. And this was in the early 90's well after the film had been shown in theaters.
It was in the Deptford Township High School, but this was a long time ago, the early 90's. I have no idea if is is still there or if it has been painted over since then.
OK I watched it. I think it would have been better if I had smoked some weed before hand. One of those 80's stoner movies for sure. Very cool "trip" down memory lane :)
The "output" of our brains is largely dependent on "input". Therefore, tumble dryer should produce less interesting results than a well crafted audiovisual work.
i always thought that the score was the whole point
just trying to think where i first saw it. i assumed it was at edinburgh university film soc (i was friends with the soc's chairman) but it can't be. some art-house place in london, i guess.
I guess I am the only one that is not cultured enough for this movie. It looks like a bunch of random, mostly fast forwarded, clips changed so many lives on HN
Have you tried watching it through—not just clips? Despite it having no dialogue, it tells an enthralling story about society & technology. I always give the caveat "this may not be for everyone" when I recommend it, but people usually follow up gleaming about the movie to me.
