Product Description

Miramax Home Entertainment and Oscar(R)-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh (Best Director, TRAFFIC, 2000) present NAQOYQATSI ("Life As War"), from filmmaker Godfrey Reggio, in collaboration with composer Phillip Glass, whose original score features renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma. In this cinematic concert -- the concluding film of the Qatsi Trilogy preceded by the critically acclaimed KOYAANISQATSI ("Life Out Of Balance"), and POWAQQATSI ("Life In Transformation") -- mesmerizing images reanimated from everyday reality, then visually altered with state-of-the-art digital techniques, chronicle the shift from a world organized by the principles of nature to one dominated by technology, the synthetic, and the virtual. Extremes of intimacy and spectacle, tragedy and hope, fuse in a tidal wave of visuals and music, giving rise to a unique artistic experience that reflects Reggio's visions of a brave new globalized world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16595 in DVD
• Brand: Disney
• Released on: 2003-10-14
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Animated, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 89 minutes

Features

• 20% Off PLUS Free Standard Shipping!

Amazon.com
Whether your intellect is completely engaged or passively detached, any viewing of Naqoyqatsi is likely to provoke a fascinating response. You can view it as a magnificent, visually stimulating music video (as critic Roger Ebert suggested you should), or in context as the third and most unsettling film in director Godfrey Reggio's "qatsi" trilogy, each titled from the Hopi language, and preceded by Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi ("Life out of Balance" and "Life in Transformation," respectively). "Life as War" is the translation of this film's title, and Reggio's theme is not one of conventional warfare, but of daily life as warfare in the age of rapidly evolving technology. The entire trilogy views humankind as a blight on the pristine nature of Earth, but here the theme is taken to its inevitable extreme: a constant flow of new and archival images--manipulated with solarization, digital enhancements, thermal effects, 2-D and 3-D animation, etc.--combine to convey athletic and military regimentation, culminating in the doomsday flowering of missiles, rockets, and all varieties of nuclear weaponry. The cumulative effect, when combined with Philip Glass's mesmerizing score (his best of the trilogy, with cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma) is one of doom-laden portent, but, as Stephen Holden observed in the New York Times, the film is also arrestingly beautiful as it weaves its hypnotic, apocalyptic spell. For those who wish to delve further, Reggio, Glass, and editor/visual designer Jon Kane provide valuable insight in a bonus panel discussion. --Jeff Shannon

From The New Yorker
Depressing, but that may be the point. This is the third film in Godfrey Reggio's qatsi series, a trilogy designed to remove the oblivious shine from modern life. Like the others, it's a series of short clips and images set to a score by Philip Glass. There's no narration-Reggio believes that "the language of the moment is the image," and the title translates from the Hopi as "a life of killing each other." The subject is not so much war as what might be called the hippie matrix-a world view that sees man as dominated by corporations, industry, and technology. Reggio has a particular talent for collecting footage from the visual fringe, such as industrial videos and MRI scans, and then distorting them in ways that makes them beautiful and ominous. The movie works best at its less didactic moments; it's not the A-bomb cloud that will haunt your dreams but the crash-test dummies in a bucking airplane, moving in slow motion with near-human grace. -Michael Agger
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Good, but not quite up to its predecessors...
The first two films of the Qatsi trilogy were made up of organic images accompanied by the music of Philip Glass. Astonishing achievements, they are, mostly because of this. The use of "found" images to tell a story - without dialog or a three-act screenplay - is quite an accomplishment.

So, in the third installment, what was left to achieve? The opposite: to tell a story with synthetic images, but also without reliance on dialog, characters, or formal dramatic structure. A purely abstract film, in other words, where every image could be controlled precisely. The result is Godfrey Reggio's Naqoyqatsi, which, in my opinion, is not quite abstract enough.

When relying on "real" images (i.e., representational) exclusively, you have to find metaphors and make connections indirectly. Koyaanisqatsi's most powerful example of this is a shot toward the end where we see an elderly person's hand emerge from an endless row of hospital beds seen obliquely so that they are nothing more than diagonal lines of metal and plastic. It's a haunting moment - humanity reaching out from the suffocating cocoon of technology it has woven about itself; reaching out for contact with something real.

But the computer-enhanced (and often computer generated) work in Naqoyqatsi goes for the obvious most of the time. Instead of oblique metaphors, we get transliterations: actual ones and zeros flying around the screen to represent information overload; corporate logos in 3-D zooming at us to tell us how pervasive they are - complete with the obvious Cheap Shot at Corporate Greed: the dreaded Enron logo; dollar signs raining on stock traders at the NYSE. And so on.

It's mostly clumsy. We even have a double-image of Dolly the cloned sheep intercut with shots of human eggs being artificially fertilized, followed by a big digital pull-back of lots and lots of naked babies, who are really the same four or five babies repeated endlessly. There is a certain aesthetic beauty in the work - the patterns are reminiscent of Salvador Dali's lattices of insects becoming clock hands; the periodic morphs, of his penchant for landscapes becoming faces. But as a whole, these images lack the elegance that marked the first two Qatsis. They're just too obvious.

That being said, Philip Glass' score is sublime. It's among his better works, eschewing strict minimalist formalism, while maintaining a minimalist kind of simplicity. It features some of the best Neo-Romantic orchestral writing I have heard in some time - a great counterpoint to the cold, industrial images of the film.

For the Completist, I recommend Naqoyqatsi. It's by no means a bad film. But for someone unfamiliar with the Qatsi aesthetic, I wouldn't start with this one. You need a grounding in the artistic sensibilities of the first two films to appreciate what does - and does not - work in this one.

By far the best of the trilogy
Okay. I saw this movie in November of last year, and even had the good fortune to meet Mr. reggio himself (I told him to watch "Dancer in the Dark", he said he loved Von Trier and I almost collapsed right there). Anyway, the movie. Of all the opening scenes in the history of cinema, I'd say the opening scene of "Naqoyqatsi" ranks in the top ten most beautiful of all time. The first image you see is an MRI image (made 3-D) of "The Tower of Babel", a painting by a famous Italian painter. It zooms in to show the incredible detail of the painting as the quite frankly INSANE music playing starts building up. Then begins a flawless, completely fluid transition from this amazing image to one even more amazing and, in my opinion, the most powerful in the film - the countless broken windows of an abandoned white building in Detroit. Now, when I saw this the first time, I had no idea where this building was or what type of building it was (someone here said it was a railroad station, though it looked to me like an apartment building). I believe the POINT is the anonymity, or better yet, the universality of the destruction and decay present in this image. It could be anywhere in the world. As Yo-Yo Ma's cello strikes out some of the most unforgettable music you'll ever hear, the camera sweeps to show the face of the ruined building in its entirety and believe me, it's one of the most haunting and beautiful images in the history of film. That's the BEGINNING of this movie! For the next 90 minutes, you're shown a panoply of images that define our times in all their confusion and strife, and all I can say is you probably won't get them out of your head for at least a week after seeing it. How can people call this a disappointment? What MAKES this film so beautiful is the integration of the real and the unreal, of the reality behind the image and the artificiality of the image itself. I believe this film is the synthesis of the trilogy, and that the filmaker's message is that life out of balance ultimately BECOMES life as war. Now, let's just hope it gets out on DVD soon.

The final spin in a bizarre trilogy
I just saw a preview screening of this in NYC tonight. It incoperates the same techniques of the previous films in the series (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi) which although may seem unconventional or strange in comparison to what we see see these days, is altogether enjoyable. In my opinion the visual narrative fails this time around but the soundtrack absolutely surpasses the others due to the contribution of Yo Yo Ma and another unflawed outing from the masterful Philip Glass. Naqoyqatsi intends to muse on our planet's war culture but get often mixed up with an ulterior commentary on technology (Although what I saw may not have been a final cut). Still worth seeing if you can find it come October. Also glad to see that the 3 will be making to DVD- a tremendous thank-you to those responsible for that!