Koyaanisqatsi

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Movie
Original title Koyaanisqatsi
Koyaanisqatsi Logo.png
Country of production United States
original language English
Hopi
Publishing year 1982
length about 82 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Godfrey Reggio
script Ron Fricke
Michael Hoenig
Godfrey Reggio
Alton Walpole
production Godfrey Reggio
Francis Ford Coppola
music Philip Glass , additional music: Michael Hoenig
camera Ron Fricke
cut Ron Fricke
Alton Walpole
occupation

-

chronology

Successor  →
Powaqqatsi

Koyaanisqatsi [ ˈkɔɪjɑːnɪsˌkatsi ] is an experimental film and the first part of the Qatsi trilogy by Godfrey Reggio , which deals with human intervention in nature and, in general, critical of civilization with the human way of life. Reggio was inspired for the film by the philosophy of Leopold Kohr. The finished film was first screened at the Telluride Film Festival on September 5, 1982 , and was released in theaters in 1983. With its sequels Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002), Koyaanisqatsi forms the Qatsi trilogy .

The absence of dialogues and characters is extraordinary, the film consists exclusively of associative slow motion and time-lapse picture sequences of cities and many natural landscapes in the United States and the music composed by Philip Glass and tailored precisely to the images.

The artists Georgia O'Keeffe and Guy Debord , the philosopher / theologian Ivan Illich and the economist Leopold Kohr are named as inspirers in the credits . The film received support from Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas and thus reached a wide audience.

The film scholar James Monaco declared Koyaanisqatsi to be one of the five most important films of the present (since 1980).

content

Scenes of the film

The title only comes into the picture slowly, accompanied by very deep voices singing the title of the film - slowly and over and over again.

Fremont rock carvings become visible. This is followed by a meditative sequence that can only be deciphered gradually as a slow-motion shot of the engine of a rocket taking off. After a hard cut, images of various rock formations can be seen over a longer period of time, later clouds forming in fast motion and - this time again in slow motion - waves in the water.

Landscapes in aerial photography follow. The next sequence shows first explosions that destroy mountain slopes, later also huge machines of the opencast mining and finally buildings of the energy supply (power lines, power plants). The sequence ends with images of two atomic bomb explosions.

The camera now shows people lying on a polluted beach, then, in a long scene, planes on the tarmac in the shimmering heat, finally cars on winding highways and an endless row of tanks.

The next scene shows a desolate, abandoned block of flats that is eventually blown up.

The following sequence follows a street into a large city, the traffic is getting denser. In the background the huge architecture of the city. Night falls, but the city never sleeps. Vehicles, controlled by traffic lights, move in straight lines through the streets. Close-ups of microchips in reverse cut. The music gets more and more hectic and unsettling in this sequence called “The Grid”.

People become visible. They lead a hectic life, on the stock exchange, in factories assembling cars or making sausages, in time-lapse you can see the clockwork of life. In the evenings in the S-Bahn station on the huge escalators, they resemble the sausages pouring out of a sausage machine. Finally they drive out of town again.

At the end of the film, the opening scene is taken up again: the rocket soars into the air, but spins and catches fire. Even in slow motion, it disintegrates into its individual parts and burns. The camera tracks a burning part of the rocket, which rises a little and then falls towards the ground. The movie pauses and fades out. There is a prophecy handed down by the Hopi Indians to read:

“When we dig valuable things out of the ground, we invite misfortune.
When the day of purification is near, cobwebs are drawn back and forth across the sky.
A container full of ashes will fall from the sky, burning the land and boiling the oceans. "

Locations

Demolition of a building in the Pruitt Igoe residential area in 1972

In addition to material recorded over the course of seven years, archive material was also used for the film, e.g. B. the start and end of a Saturn V rocket of the Apollo 12 mission and an exploding and falling back to earth, unmanned Atlas 104D rocket . This is the only launch of an Atlas LV-3C Centaur-A on May 8, 1962 from the American spaceport Cape Canaveral .

Pruitt-Igoe was an urban housing project in St. Louis , Missouri . It is widely used in the US as an example of failure in social housing and urban renewal. The demolition of Pruitt-Igoe received special attention in the American media and is now part of popular culture as an anti-stencil. The postmodern architect Charles Jencks even remarked that the demolition marks the day when postwar modernism ended ("the day Modern Architecture died.")

Name and message

Reggio consciously chose a word as the film title that does not come from any written language. Koyaanisqatsi, which can be translated as “life in imbalance”, is a word from the oral language of the North American Indian tribe of the Hopi . The way in which modern culture is presented with its bizarre, beautiful recordings, in connection with the restless music and the tragic end, is intended to show how distant current life in civilization is from human nature.

reception

Hans-Christoph Blumenberg criticized the film for “any criticism of progress (which couldn't be more striking) from the cloudy heights of a distant mythology”, but was even impressed by the “strange intoxicating state that this film, like a drug, even able to trigger in the minds of skeptics ”.

Film music

Since Koyaanisqatsi is a dialogue-free film, the music plays a prominent role. It was founded by Philip Glass composed and the Philip Glass Ensemble interpreted.

Pieces of the original film music by Philip Glass , released in 1983 on Island Records .
  1. Koyaanisqatsi (3:30)
  2. Vessels (8:03)
  3. Cloudscape (4:41)
  4. Pruit Igoe (7:02)
  5. The Grid (14:50)
  6. Prophecies (8:10)
Pieces from the new recording, including all parts, were released in 1998 by Nonesuch Records
  1. Koyaanisqatsi (3:28)
  2. Organic (7:43)
  3. Cloudscape (4:34)
  4. Resource (6:39)
  5. Vessels (8:05)
  6. Pruit Igoe (7:53)
  7. The Grid (21:23)
  8. Prophecies (13:36)
In 2009, Orange Mountain Music released the uncut Complete Original Soundtrack Version
  1. Koyaanisqatsi (3:27)
  2. Organic (4:57)
  3. Clouds (4:37)
  4. Resource (6:36)
  5. Vessels (8:13)
  6. Pruitt Igoe (7:51)
  7. Pruitt Igoe Coda (1:17)
  8. SloMo People (1:19)
  9. The Grid Introduction (3:24)
  10. The Grid (18:05)
  11. Microchip (1:47)
  12. Prophecies (10:34)
  13. Translations and Credits (2:11)

reception

This film music was later used in various other productions:

  • The track "Pruit Igoe" was used in an uncut version in the first trailer of the video game GTA IV and can also be found later in the game on the radio station "The Journey".
  • The theme music and the in-game music of the computer game Delta is an interpretation of parts of the film music ("Pruit Igoe", "Koyaanisqatsi") by the computer game musician Rob Hubbard .
  • The play "Koyaanisqatsi" is alluded to at Scrubs - The Beginners in season 5 in episode 5 "My New God" and 17 "My Pencil" when the caretaker tries to throw a dirty look at JD or Carla.
  • The pieces "Pruit Igoe" and "Prophecies" are used in the film Watchmen - The Guardians .
  • In episode 15 of the 21st season of the Simpsons (The Stolen Kiss) the song "Pruit Igoe" is used in an excerpt from the fictional film "Koyaanis-Scratchy: Death out of Balance". In episode 19 of the 22nd season (The Mafiosi Bride), the bus driver Otto looks at the DVD cover of Koyaanisqatsi after he has (allegedly) consumed hallucinogenic mushrooms . The composer of the film music Philip Glass is specifically mentioned.
  • In episode 5 of the 6th season of the Gilmore Girls "We've Got Magic To Do", Kirk mimes 'The Journey of Man' to "Koyaanisqatsi".
  • Madonna's music video for "Ray of Light" from 1998 mimics Koyaanisqatsi's cinematic style with his time-lapse recordings

Awards

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Charles Jencks. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. Rizzoli. 1977. Page 9.
  2. ↑ Hans-Christoph Blumenberg: The sharpest drug , Die Zeit, 1983, No. 46
  3. ^ Various - Watchmen - Music From The Motion Picture. In: discogs.com. Discogs, accessed March 19, 2016 .
  4. ↑ The Stolen Kiss - Simpsonspedia, the Simpsons Wiki. In: simpsonspedia.net. Retrieved March 19, 2016 .

Web links