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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
"Koyaanisqatsi" director Godfrey Reggio invented a film genre, prefiguring the campus classic "Baraka." There are no words in his latest -- just one cutting image after another.
Nov 5, 2002 | The camera focuses on an engraved brown rock surface -- a primitive relief that depicts human figures congregated around a monolithic object. This first image from the 1983 documentary film "Koyaanisqatsi" launched a trilogy that has taken director Godfrey Reggio more than 20 years to complete.
"Naqoyqatsi," the final film in his series of wordless movies, recently opened in New York and Los Angeles. It ends with a human figure floating through a computer-simulated background. As with the other films in the series, there is no narrative and no dialogue in "Naqoyqatsi" -- just a painstakingly edited assemblage of images set to the haunting and hypnotic original score of composer Philip Glass.
The juxtaposition of how "Koyaanisqatsi" begins and how "Naqoyqatsi" ends gets to the core message of Reggio's work. For him, nature and our self-created world (call it human nature) are so irreconcilable that we live our daily lives in a perpetual state of imbalance.
The trilogy, "Koyaanisqatsi" (1983), "Powaqqatsi" (1988) and "Naqoyqatsi" (2002), is an opus about life on this planet. Reggio spent his adolescent years sequestered in a monastery of the Christian Brothers order, and this film project has almost monastic clarity and discipline. It's a documentary project of mammoth proportions, one that Reggio hopes will have even broader sociological implications.
"Koyaanisqatsi" means "life out of balance" in the Hopi language. In shifting montages, the film places nature side by side with urban life -- desert landscapes and scenes from fast-paced metropolises. (It was shot and edited by Ron Fricke, who went on to create other documentaries of the genre, notably "Baraka" in 1992.) "Powaqqatsi," or "life in transformation," focuses predominantly on developing countries and the way nature's resources are pillaged to sustain human life. The latest film, "Naqoyqatsi," "life as war," suggests that our daily lives -- competition in the workplace, sports, our relationship to technology, a frantic consumer culture -- simulate, if not stimulate, war. It took Reggio over a decade to finance this swan song, but the timing could not have been more appropriate. War, after all, looms.
But how do you get people to see a feature film without words? Reggio's first film still has a loyal cult following. "'Koyaanisqatsi' was tremendously successful, especially in art houses and on college campuses -- probably one of the most successful films of the '80s," says film historian and Bard College professor Scott Macdonald. The films have played as far as Russia and South Africa in international festivals; the series is as universal as it gets -- there's no language barrier.
The films are, however, extremely unusual. In order to market the newest feature, the film's producers have turned to a homespun, anti-tech strategy. In New York and Los Angeles, raw, hand-photocopied fliers are being posted on the streets. One flier makes a list of goals for happiness, in effect, asking us if all there is to life is a flashy car and a well-paying job. Another looks distinctly like a band flier, but announces, "This is not a band, it's a movie." With this kind of low-key, viral marketing, a massive audience for "Naqoyqatsi" would be a miracle.
But the Qatsi trilogy has seen its share of miracles. Each of the three films might not have made it to the big screen if not for the support of three different well-known movie directors. Back in the early '80s, Reggio and his colleagues were in post-production on "Koyaanisqatsi" at the Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood. Director Francis Ford Coppola was at the studios as well. One day, he happened to catch sight of the film and requested a private screening. Coppola loved the film. "He said he would do anything he could to make this available to the public," recalls Reggio.
In 1988, George Lucas presented "Powaqqatsi" with Coppola. Neither one took production credits -- they merely lent their names to help cultivate a bigger audience. And more recently, in March 2000, director Steven Soderbergh came across an article in the New York Times that mentioned Reggio's ongoing dilemma in finding backing for "Naqoyqatsi." It wasn't long before Soderbergh approached the humble Louisiana-born documentary filmmaker and offered his support for the third act. This is the end of the trilogy, says Reggio: "For 27 years I've had this commitment to make these films. Now I'm free of that necessity."
"Naqoyqatsi" represents a noticeable departure from the style of the first two films. Eighty percent of the film is made up of stock footage -- commercials, newsreels, computer animations and such. That footage has in turn been fed into computers and digitally manipulated. A platoon of paratroopers, for example, jumps out of a transport plane over and over again. But in "Naqoyqatsi," for the most part, the enemy does not wield a gun. The enemy is technology itself -- and, in a bit of easy irony, the medium through which the documentary was made.
The dizzying visuals consist of numbers, words, genetic sequences, theorems and bar codes in motion, as well as moving collages of consumerist ephemera (commercials, products, logos). As these images carry the viewer through the film and into a state of queasy confusion, they make a not-so-subtle exaltation: Technology is not outside of us -- it's who we are. In the end, the means of conveying the message -- the fast-paced and disfiguring computer-tweaked visuals -- is the message. In other words, social commentaries on technology can only be properly explained through that very technology.
