Koyaanisqatsi
I watched the film Koyaanisqatsi. I’m not sure where I heard of it, or why I thought I’d be interested, but I popped it on my server and eventually the time came. Turns out I was onto something, because this is a fascinating film — no dialogue, no story, no characters, just “cinematic language”.
It opens on a long, meditative sequence of some cave paintings (?) scored by a chant of Koyaanisqatsi that eventually transitions to a rocket launch. For a long time, I wasn’t sure exactly what was being depicted, but I found myself being drawn into the film’s distinctive atmosphere. What does Koyaanisqatsi mean? What does this image mean? Gradually, I was drawn into a very particular state of consciousness, just in time for the film “proper” to start.
I think the music of the “film proper” is very important. I wasn’t surprised to see Phillip Glass in the credits at the end, because this is exactly the kinda shit he would get up to. Most of the movie uses droning music consisting of arpeggiating triads, or even just alternating roots and fifths. There is almost no melody, all harmony. This guides us through long, glacial pans of deserts, outcrops of rocks, caves, water, clouds. I had the impression of seeing the ingredients of the world we live in, but I can’t tell you exactly what I was thinking of. I do know that I needed to be fully immersed in the rhythm of the film to be captured up in that state of mind. Feelings of awe, terror, sorrow. How little actually “happens” belies the true density of this film. It’s a Schoenberg piece of atonal music, but of course much less extreme. The images rock you between emotions so violently and unpredictably that it’s hard to describe.
I’m a language guy. In another life, I wanted to be a mathematician. It’s said that every mathematician has one tool that they’re really good at (maybe two, if you’re truly a genius). My tool was shuffling around symbols. My favorite field was algebraic geometry. Nominally, it’s the study of geometry, shapes in space, one of the most fundamental, most “human” domains of thinking that you could imagine. But through sheer force of analogy, the geometric world can be wrestled into the world of algebra, which is no more than the study of symbols and rules. I consider it to be a language, in some way. I’ve always felt that, faced with any kind of problem, if I could convert it it to the domain of language, then I could solve it. Words are my only weapon, or the closest thing I’ve got. And that’s why I keep music, films, and animation around. To keep me from being trapped in the matrix of language. And this movie is a perfect example of how cinematic “language” can express things that human languages cannot (or maybe not yet).
As the film transitions from the majestic scenes of nature to the refinery (?) it focuses in for a solid twenty (thirty? ten? what is time) minutes, I almost rolled my eyes. Despite no words being said, I felt like I was being lectured to, as we see a tractor start up and become engulfed in a miasma of black smoke. I think this is a testament to how strongly this “film language” works. I guess I’m fundamentally skeptical of ideology. I think, why can’t you just shut up and show me the images and let me decide? Of course, there’s no film without ideology, because someone has to choose which images to show… but I digress. The images of machinery in the desert are just as majestic in their own way. I think to myself upon seeing the massive latticework of beams: it’s almost like a cobweb, a beautiful artifact that is proof that we were here, and just like a spider’s web, an almost inevitable byproduct of our organism. Everywhere we go, we leave cobwebs behind.
Luckily, the film is not as simple as you would think, or at least I feel it’s more complex than that. I think this is exemplified by the shift in focus to humans. As the camera lingers on a dilapidated city about to be destroyed, the score plays, for the first time since the beginning, an actual melody. It’s quite a long, linear phrase, too. We see flashes of highways, the analogies between droves of cars and crowds of people, the ordered chaos of city lights, and factories, food, and shopping. The infinite complexity of human faces, expressions without words. Towards the end, some of these humans look back at the camera, and we get the first glimpses of self-awareness.
At the end (and I’m glad I didn’t look anything up!) the meaning of the word is revealed, as well as the “prophecies” in the lyrics of the music. Koyaanisqatsi has many meanings, positive, negative, and neutral. Apparently, the director Godfrey Reggio would have preferred there to be no title at all, and perhaps as the second best option selected an abstract foreign word with five meanings. You could see the film as a ham-fisted environmental parable (in which case I’d still fully support it, tree-hugger that I am), but I think it’s more than that. I think there is a fatalistic sort of tone to the whole thing, and as much of a neutral admiration as an admonishment of technology and society. In any case, I think assigning a meaning to the whole thing, especially a meaning in language, is besides the point.
- It's not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It's because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live. - Godfrey Reggio