Film: Interpreting Koyaanisqatsi

Of all films, Koyaanisqatsi is the one that has emerged as a unique, one-of-a-kind game-changer. The way it juxtaposes images and music in contrasting ways shed important light on our society and all the haphazard madness of mankind's constructions. Chances are you might have seen the film's influences and not realized it--parts of Philip Glass' music score was used in 2009's Watchmen, the Simpsons parodied the film in one episode, and the same techniques in time-lapse photography have been aped in countless commercials and music videos (ever see Madonna's "Ray of Light" video? It's almost like a mini-Koyannisqatsi with dancing).

For me, it's a film that has consistently moved my soul and stirred my thoughts, becoming one of my biggest cinematic inspirations. It is a film where less is more--it offers nothing but images and music, but it's up to the viewer to determine the artistic merit. Some viewers might not see much beneath the surface, but I do. It's a dense brick of a film, and these are my thoughts about what it all means.

Behind the Scenes

In the 70s, Godfrey Reggio set out to make a difference. He worked in Albuquerque on a media campaign funded by the UCLA--this led to some visually striking commercials that drew attention to the invasion of privacy in the technological age (something really ahead of its time), and government mind control. As a result, Reggio netted enough funds to help the youth of New Mexico by eliminating Ritalin as a behavior-modifying solution from various school districts. He still had $40,000 to spend, so he decided to make a film.

Without a script, Reggio shot some scenes with cinematographer Ron Fricke on 16mm film (it was all they could afford). They shot in St. Louis, Chicago, Washington, and New York--at the latter place, they toyed around with portrait shots, and some pedestrians posed in front of the camera thinking it was for still-images. The initial shots weren't particularly thrilling. But as funding trickled in, the filmmakers captured additional footage over the years. With proper 35mm film, they shot at many more locations. Additional work and exposure introduced the notion of time-lapse photography, which enabled them to add another dimension to the project. With the help of Francis Ford Coppola, the filmmakers released the final product in 1983--a film with such a different style and structure, it was highly-praised in the arthouse circles and has made its mark on society.

What Does It Mean?

Koyaanisqatsi's definition comes from the Hopi language. In the simplest terms, it means "life out of balance."

The ways in which the film shows a life out of balance is through specific images and themes, which are reinforced by these prophecies sung throughout the film's soundtrack.

The film specifically shows man's efforts to dig into the Earth, using explosives and machines to reshape and transform the landscape into something artificial. Then, skyscrapers appear (often reflecting the blue skies and clouds so clearly they appear like giant grids in the sky). There are airplanes and jets. After some lengthy sequences that dive into the industry and lifestyles of man, the film ends with the fist Alpha-Centaur rocket exploding in mid-flight. Thus, all three prophecies are shown visually, and all together they suggest something apocalyptic.

It's easy to walk away from the film feeling pessimistic, in spite of these messages and the ending. The film is more than that though--it revels in the triumphs of man just as equally as it suggests doom. It makes the entire experience bittersweet.

It helps to keep these definitions in mind while watching the film, because it will help put perspective on what all the images (even the most unassuming of them) are saying. Here's the scene-by-scene analysis.

The Film

The film is book-ended with shots of the Great Gallery--giant pictographs in Horseshoe Canyon, Utah. They stand about eight foot tall in height, and appear as weird, tall, thin black figures around a central figure that has odd patterns all over it. This is known as the Holy Ghost panel. It was made somewhere between 400 and 1100 AD by the Desert Archaic culture (predating the Fremonts and Puebloans). The canyon was abandoned by 1300 AD. Nobody really knows what happened to the ancient people who used to reside in the canyons, and nobody knows what the rock art actually means. There is no denying that they look like ghosts--which is appropriate, because the people who made this art are long gone, and the art itself is a mere trace of their culture (and in itself a ghost).

The Great Gallery, Horseshoe Canyon UT

After a long, sustained pull-back of the rock art, the film transitions into showing fire that fills up the whole screen. When it fades, we see that it's actually the thrusters of a shuttle very slowly taking off. There's nothing but metal, falling debris, and flames. It's nothing like the previous shot, which was a tranquil and natural scene--this is a violent, artificial thing. The contrast is stark, and it prevails throughout the entire movie--nature scenes, followed by the artificial. Put together, it shows how humans have exploited the landscape in the name of technology and progress.

A good 18 minutes is spent on nature scenes--we see miles and miles of the American southwest, with its distinct red-tinged stone, unusual rock formations, mesas, deserts, sand, rivers, lakes, and mountains. With time-lapse photography, we see clouds form and evaporate in minutes--they flow and drift over hills and mountains. These are calm, serene scenes. Very little actual life is seen, but it's there in the form of the moving air. The biggest thing to understand out of all this is that the Earth has been here for millions of years. Nothing moves, everything is balanced. Left alone, it would all remain still and tranquil for millions of years more.

Lake Powell, UT

Then, BOOM! Mankind finally makes its appearance on the screen, in the form of machines that till the ground and blast mountains and hills to pieces. One digging machine spews black smoke swirls around it and engulfs the worker nearby. All this violence against the land leads to power lines popping up all over the deserts and hills. In addition to roads.

To me, some power lines look like giant people looming over the landscape, holding up cables. Could it be that these shots of power lines were meant to mirror the big-shouldered figures seen on the Great Gallery?

What do you think? Do these look a little anthropomorphic?

One thing is certain--you can't have cities until you lay down a foundation. The film shows some overhead views of power plants and a dam, which are necessary to feed energy into human civilization. Gone are the flat, clean, pristine views of nature.

A woman is seen sunbathing on a beach. The camera pans up, and we see a big, gray, ugly power plant towering over the beach. There's a lot that can be inferred from this--I can't help but to wonder what kind of runoff or pollution is spewing onto the beach and waters, unbeknownst to the sunbathers.

In the next scene, a group of people are mingling about, looking up at something. Some of them are taking pictures. In the next shot, we see the side of a giant building, reflecting the blue sky. It's nothing but a wall of blue with black lines--a grid in the sky. Kinda like a net, or a web, wouldn't you say? With the way people are gawking at this building and the majestic music score, it leads us to believe that this building is a marvel and an achievement. All buildings like this are, and the film showcases many as it goes on. They are so huge they seem to touch the sky (hence the term "skyscraper"). But with this initial shot, I can't help but to think about 2001: A Space Odyssey, when monkeys gather around the black monolith. I don't think it's an intentional parallel, but both scenes have a sense of awe to them, and in both the monolith has a captivating effect.

For a really long shot, we see an airplane taxiing on a runway. The screen wavers constantly (because of the heat), distorting the plane until it comes so close it fills up the whole frame. This is probably my least-favorite shot of the movie (because it's so bloody long), but the theme of human progress is there. Planes criss-cross the sky all the time (forming "cobwebs" it would seem, although the film never shows this in a literal sense). Later on, we see a couple of shots of city traffic, and a plane cuts across the middle of the frame. It looks funny because the plane looks mixed in with normal cars and buildings. It's there to show the constant bustle across many transportation modes.

As the film shows roads jam-packed with traffic, it shifts to a scene where rows and rows of cars fill up an entire field. I'm not sure if these are cars waiting to be sold, or if this is a car graveyeard. Either way, they are in disuse. Then the film cuts to rows and rows of tanks. We get into some intense montages of war scenes, with planes dropping bombs and rockets shooting off in the air (mirroring the first and final scenes). An aircraft carrier sports the E=MC2 equation on its deck--the formula for mass-energy equivalence. It means that any form of mass will have an equal amount of energy. And energy is expended throughout this sequence in the form of rocket propulsion and explosions that tear the Earth apart (echoing scenes from before). Ominously, there is a shot of an actual Fat Man in the mix. The film shows an atomic explosion in an earlier segment. The potential is limitless--people will expend great amounts of energy to destroy.

After a big Michael Bay style splurge of explosions, the film settles down to show cities. Buildings take up the entire frame, stretching across the landscape. This is what's popped up following all that Earthly destruction. But it's not all that pretty--this is Pruitt-Igoe, a housing development that became infamous for its poverty, crime, and racial segregation. In the film, the buildings are largely abandoned and in a state of decay. There's debris and garbage all over the streets. Light posts are broken. Building windows broken. People bust open a fire hydrant and play in it. It's not a particularly attractive place to live--inevitably, the buildings are demolished on-screen and collapse before our eyes.

There's a brief sequence that shows cities beneath moving clouds, and fresh new skyscrapers. It's as if following the destruction of Pruitt-Igoe, people have made way for a new set of living spaces.

41 minutes into the movie, now there are people everywhere. We've gone from a macro view of the world to the micro. We see people jam-packed in lines waiting for...something? We see them packed in the streets. And we see dramatic slow-motion shots of people as they pass by, occasionally gawking at the camera. In most portrait and candid shots, people can't help but to glance at the camera, and I took it as a sign that they were either curious or suspicious of the filming. Either way, we rarely see anybody smile. Their expressions are always of concern, worry, apprehension. In one ironic scene, people walk by with a giant billboard behind them that says "Have a barrel of fun." But is anybody really having fun here?

There are a few portrait shots--women standing in front of a fast-moving gray background (a subway I guess?), a jet pilot in front of a plane, and Vegas showgirls. The latter is especially eye-catching because the girls stand there for a very long time smiling, but they shift and look around uncomfortably. I always got the feeling their smiles were purely superficial (as they would be anyway since they're posing for a picture), and it makes me wonder if it represents their roles overall. They're there to give people a good time, but are they happy themselves?

Is anybody having a barrel of fun here?

Next, the film transitions into nighttime shots of the city. And it's time-lapsed, so we see lights streaking across the streets beneath the buildings and their lighted windows. One of the film's most famous shots shows the moon (particularly big--it must have either been superimposed or taken with a very good telephoto lens) creeping into the sky and disappearing behind a building. More importantly, the speeding traffic looks like rivers of  light. Just as shots at the beginning of the film showed natural rivers snaking through the canyons, now we have man-made canyons and man-made rivers. All without stone or water. All very flat, angular, and sharp.

Grand central station, New York. Thousands of people flow through the wide-open platforms and corridors as if they're fish in a river. From here on (probably the most enthralling scenes of the movie), we see a huge montage of man-made things. We see lots of machines--factories producing the very same cars we've seen filling up the roads. TVs--they're produced in factories, then people watch and play games on them, and for one prolonged scene we see a time-lapse of endless programming, spewing images at us in light-speed (although if you look closely there are a few scenes of topless ladies spliced in there). Towards the end of the sequence, a big wall of TVs suddenly explodes. A product created, used, then destroyed.

But that's not all--we see a hot-dog production line (and it's kinda funny how the rhythmic music has vocals that almost sounds like "hot dog hot dog" over and over again). After a bunch of men gather around this machine, it spews meat out endlessly, with hands occasionally touching it to unclog jams. Produced food is shown a few more times--twinkies and some jam-filled pastry. In the midst of the montage, we also see people eating. They sit at restaurants and food courts, chowing down and sipping drinks while they chat. And as a time-lapse, it happens in a blur as people move behind and around them. Nothing but a whirlwind of activity.

The film just goes faster and faster as it shows people working then getting off of work, only to distract themselves with food and entertainment. Movie theaters. Bowling. The arcade. Disco dancing. Occasionally, there are a few slow-motion shots of people (who still look unhappy). As the film speeds up, it places the camera in the weirdest of places. One minute, it's on a factory assembly line, showing the point of view of a twinkie or machine part. The next, it's in a shopping cart, whizzing through a grocery store. In one inventive scene (something that might have been an influence on the first The Fast and the Furious film), the camera is in the back seat of a car, and we see the city lights streaking past all the windows. The lights continue to flash and glide past, becoming an electric, Tron-like display of pure speed.

Right at the climax of all this madness, the film jump-cuts to an overhead view of the city in daylight. It fades into circuit boards. The connection is clear, given the roads, the lights, the buildings we've already seen. Circuit boards exist to guide electrons across paths to make something work. Cities work the same way, only we are the electrons. This is the man-made world.

For the last segment of the film, the music becomes somber, and we're shown a montage of people. They are all unhappy. They shove themselves into packed elevators and cage themselves on buses and trains. There's a man with a hat that advertises sight-seeing tours--he seems to be looking around with a frown. One old man stares right into the camera and shaves his neck for some reason. A woman is smoking, but shakes her lighter when it doesn't work. A naked man stares out a window. An old man (with cuts on his head) walks up to the camera holding out change. People move among a pile of debris--a firefighter walks through smoke, presumably to help put out a fire. Medics lift a man off the street and put him on a stretcher. I think the most evocative image is of a single hand rising out of a hospital gurney, and a nurse comes along to hold it. Only a few of these people seem to be smiling or happy, but even then it's hard to tell what's real happiness among all this misery and chaos.

Man and technology--an unhappy union.

Inevitably, the film shows the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. It superimposes the images on top of each other, so the people become transparent as they move. Everybody comes and goes, but they don't stay the same way the places do. They are ghosts.

For a whole minute or so, we see stock footage of the first Alpha Centaur rocket blasting off. Its metal chassis heaves off the ground as fire rushes out of its huge engine. It rises...rises...rises... It explodes. Fire fills up the entire screen, before the remnants become a trail of smoke. The camera tracks the debris as it falls, before the film ends with another panel of the Great Gallery.

The rocket--it must be the height of human civilization. It takes so much of our knowledge to build. It uses so much energy, which has to be harnessed from the Earth somehow. It allows us to reach space, going far beyond the sky to look down and support our cities with satellites. And yet, when the rocket explodes, it's as if we've reached a critical threshold. Something was unbalanced in that rocket and it couldn't sustain itself all the way into space. Thus, it burst and descended. The same thing could happen to human civilization itself. After all, other cultures (ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Easter Island) rose to great heights and fell when they couldn't sustain themselves. How much longer can modern civilization last under our current infrastructure, before it wears thin and bursts?

How much longer before all our accomplishments are turned to ruin and we all become ghosts?