Product Description

Studio: Tcfhe/mgm Release Date: 09/21/2004 Run time: 184 minutes

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12861 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-09-17
• Rating: G (General Audience)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 184 minutes

Amazon.com
Koyaanisqatsi
First-time filmmaker Godfrey Reggio's experimental documentary from 1983--shot mostly in the desert Southwest and New York City on a tiny budget with no script, then attracting the support of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas and enlisting the indispensable musical contribution of Philip Glass--delighted college students on the midnight circuit and fans of minimalism for many years. Meanwhile, its techniques, merging cinematographer Ron Fricke's time-lapse shots (alternately peripatetic and hyperspeed) with Glass's reiterative music (from the meditative to the orgiastic)--as well as its ecology-minded imagery--crept into the consciousness of popular culture. The influence of Koyaanisqatsi, or "life out of balance," has by now become unmistakable in television advertisements, music videos, and, of course, similar movies such as Fricke's own Chronos and Craig McCourry's Apogee. Reggio shot a sequel, Powaqqatsi (1988), and completed the trilogy with Naqoyqatsi (2002). Koyaanisqatsi provides the uninitiated the chance to see where it all started--along with an intense audiovisual rush.

Powaqqatsi
Powaqqatsi (1988), or "life in transformation," is the second part of a trilogy of experimental documentaries whose titles derive from Hopi compound nouns. The now legendary Koyaanisqatsi (1983), or "life out of balance," was the first. Naqoyqatsi (2002), or "life in war," was the third. Powaqqatsi finds director Godfrey Reggio somewhat more directly polemical than before, and his major collaborator, the composer Philip Glass, stretching to embrace world music. Reggio reuses techniques familiar from the previous film (slow motion, time-lapse, superposition) to dramatize the effects of the so-called First World on the Third: displacement, pollution, alienation. But he spends as much time beautifully depicting what various cultures have lost--cooperative living, a sense of joy in labor, and religious values--as he does confronting viewers with trains, airliners, coal cars, and loneliness. What had been a more or less peaceful, slow-moving, spiritually fulfilling rural existence for these "silent" people (all we hear is music and sound effects) becomes a crowded, suffocating, accelerating industrial urban hell, from Peru to Pakistan. Reggio frames Powaqqatsi with a telling image: the Serra Pelada gold mines, where thousands of men, their clothes and skin imbued with the earth they're moving, carry wet bags up steep slopes in a Sisyphean effort to provide wealth for their employers. While Glass juxtaposes his strangely joyful music, which includes the voices of South American children, a number of these men carry one of their exhausted comrades out of the pit, his head back and arms outstretched--one more sacrifice to Caesar. Nevertheless, Reggio, a former member of the Christian Brothers, seems to maintain hope for renewal. --Robert Burns Neveldine

Customer Reviews

Non-verbal. Non-linear. Non-cliched.
When someone asks me what my favorite movies are, I usually give them a fairly predictable list: 2001, Citizen Kane, The Seven Samurai, and so on. By the time I get to #10 or so, I add, "Oh, and 'Koyaanisqatsi.'"

That stops them cold. Most people, even folks who consider themselves film buffs, have never heard of "Koyaanisqatsi." Most of them can't even pronounce it. (No foul there; I get tripped up on Ukranian names myself. No reason to expect them to get a Hopi word perfectly the first time.) When I tell them about it, though, my own eyes light up and my hands move and my face twists in all different ways. And they see that, and they get curious, and then they too want to see this amazing movie that has no plot, no dialogue and no characters. It is one of the most extraordinary movies ever made.

"Koyaanisqatsi" is one of the very few truly experimental movies in which the experiment is a success. It has, as I have said, nothing resembling a conventional plot. There are no main characters, or supporting ones, for that matter. There is not a single word spoken during the film, except for songs in the Hopi language. It is entirely images of nature, mankind, and the artifacts of mankind -- sometimes speeded up, sometimes slowed down, sometimes in real time, but always seen in a curiously wide-eyed and totally undiluted way.

The film may not have a plot, but it has a story. It opens in the American desert, where the hand of man rarely intrudes, and them moves by degrees into man's world. What I find most interesting is that the movie's editing and camerawork often seem to be doing two things at once: we look at these things man has made, and in some cases we are repelled, but in many cases we are hypnotized or fascinated. When the camera sits at the foot of a giant glass skyscraper, reflecting the clouds around it, should we be repelled? The skyscraper has a beauty to it that is as valid as the buttes in the desert, and one of the movie's treasures is that it makes this argument almost despite itself.

The late sections of the film grow faster in editing and in presentation. Philip Glass's score - sometimes slow, sometimes fast, always mesmerizing - both illuminates and stands aside from the movie; it can be heard on its own, as something quite apart from the images, or it can be seen as the Greek chorus for the film's "narrative." This kind of duality runs through the film: we can see it as a relatively straight "visual poem" in which the movie's title -- "life out of balance" -- is depicted in a relatively straightforward way. Or we can look beyond that and see a complex case: As saddening as the world may be, is it not the only one we have?

The director of "Koyaanisqatsi," Godfrey Reggio, has made it clear that he considers the film to be both polemical and non-polemical: "KOYAANISQATSI is not so much about something, nor does it have a specific meaning or value ... So while I might have this or that intention in creating this film, I realize fully that any meaning or value KOYAANISQATSI might have comes exclusively from the beholder. The film's role is to provoke, to raise questions that only the audience can answer. This is the highest value of any work of art, not predetermined meaning, but meaning gleaned from the experience of the encounter. The encounter is my interest, not the meaning. If meaning is the point, then propaganda and advertising is the form. So in the sense of art, the meaning of KOYAANISQATSI is whatever you wish to make of it. This is its power."

"Koyaanisqatsi" currently exists in a legal limbo which has not been properly resolved. Copies of the movie on DVD are available directly from the movie's web site..., and the funds from purchases of the film help Reggio and his cohorts free the movie from its grave. They will also go towards the production of another film in the "Koyaanisqatsi" cycle, which I imagine will be at least as eye-opening as this one is -- if lacking in the total newness of form that "Koyaanisqatsi" brought with it.

FINALLY available commercially on DVD, BUT....
....as another reviewer has said, KOYAANISQATSI is CROPPED. I own the limited edition DVD that was sold as a fundraiser around a year ago by the Institute for Regional Education (IRE) and it is in 4:3. The new MGM so-called "widescreen" release simply adds black bars to the top and bottom of the screen, with NO extra width shown- the other reviewer is 100% correct! I compared the IRE DVD with the new MGM commercial release on two DVD players at the same time, and the size of each picture is exactly the same, but the MGM release has black bars blocking Ron Fricke's cinematography. The bars take away 2 inches from the top and bottom of the screen of my 32" TV, or 4 inches of picture height total. I love widescreen movies, but purposely blocking out what was originally filmed is RIDICULOUS. KOY was originally filmed in 4:3, not widescreen.

These films are the two greatest combinations of music and film ever made- it's just a shame to see KOY treated so poorly. Nice interviews with Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass and cheap price still makes it a must-buy. All we can hope for is maybe a "special edition" in the future that's done right as this release is apparently selling pretty well.

Right now, the best KOY sound is found on the laserdisc, and the best picture is found on the limited edition IRE DVD which is no longer available. I'm so happy I didn't sell it! It's a priceless collector's item now!

I haven't yet checked the new MGM DVD of POWAQQATSI compared to my VHS POW videotape as far as the black bars taking away picture from the original- but the new POW DVD indeed has an incredible picture quality and the soundtrack fared very well in the conversion to Dolby Digital- it sounds excellent. KOY sounds muffled and too rolled off in the highs.

Steve Glassfan

Moving and thought-provoking
"Koyaanisqatsi" has held up well over the years since I first saw it at the cinema. Its images were almost all as powerful via this DVD as I remember them having been 20 years ago. Those that have worn a little thin--notably the transition from a satellite view of a city to an extreme close-up of a computer chip--have done so because they have been so often imitated and repeated since "Koyaanisqatsi" was first seen.

I found "Powaqqatsi" less riveting on this first viewing than "Koyaanisqatsi," but noticed that it resonated longer in my mind and provoked more thought and conversation later. Its images and ideas have remained with me for weeks now.

The "Qatsi" films are unique works, neither documentary nor entertainment in the strict sense of either term. Nor are they mere visual social commentaries. The music of Philip Glass, the amazing, often context-less cinematography, the editing, and the philosophical underpinnings that drive the enterprise, all combine in a work that defies categorization but can't fail to stir the viewer.

The DVDs each contain a commentary section featuring writer-directory Godfrey Reggio and composer Glass. The commentaries provide some concreteness in the vast abstraction of the work, but I made the mistake of watching the "Powaqqatsi" commentary before seeing the film, and it diminished the film's impact. I recommend savoring the films themselves at least once before going to the commentaries.