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When I was on staff in the story department at Disney Animated Features, our fearless leader Peter Schneider (who has just produced a film about the comeback story of Disney Animation called Waking Sleeping Beauty)arranged a special screening of Koyaanisqatsi for the animators and story people. I stumbled across it again today while researching pictographs from The Great Gallery in Utah. As it happens, Koyaanisqatsi opens with the very pictograph that captured my imagination. Maybe some part of me remembered it.
Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word that roughly translates to "Life Out of Balance". Many people interpret it as being one of the first environmentally aware films as it juxtaposes nature with the technological world. However, the filmmaker describes it simply as "the beauty of the beast" and leaves the meaning of the film to the individual viewer.
There is no dialogue and the music was composed by Philip Glass. THis was Philip Glass's first film score. It has since become a cult classic of sorts in a trilogy of "Qatsi" films. It was shot between 1975 and 1982 using time lapse photography.
Koyaanisqatsi is a favorite film. It strikes people different ways but when it was first released in 1982, it was astoundingly original and won an award from Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope Studios . Coppola now claims executive producer credit for the film. It was produced by The Institute of Regional Education & Fund for Change, and released by Polygram, which went out of business and sold its library to MGM who re-released it in 2008 as the first of its films available on YouTube.
Below, is a "making of" documentary featuring the film's director, Godfrey Reggio. It's well worth watching. He discusses the removal of standard structures in storytelling as a way of communicating the central message - that we are not affected by techonology as much as we are enveloped by it. Reggio credits his collaborators Philip Glass and cinemaphotographer Ron Fricke with the success of this film.
Created between 1975 and 1982, the film is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds -- urban life and technology versus the environment... KOYAANISQATSI is not so much about something, nor does it have a specific meaning or value. KOYAANISQATSI is, after all, an animated object, an object in moving time, the meaning of which is up to the viewer.
The film is as moving and mysterious as it was the first time I saw it. A true classic that speaks louder and more eloquently than any words could've ever done.
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