Koyaanisqtsi

The Hopi word Koyaanisqatsi has several meanings: "Crazy life," "life out of balance," "life in turmoil," "life disintegrating," and "a state of life which calls for another way of life." These are themes that Mr. Reggio expressed throughout the film, but which were highlighted in the imagery of the latter half of the film.

Mr. Reggio displays the energy and entropy inherent in nature, along with their mirror images in humanity. Through pictures of the hustle and bustle of humanity interspersed with scenes of despair and depression, indicate that the energy and chaos of humanity have gone beyond what is natural. The energy embodied in nature has a timelessness that is absent in humanity.

The scenes of nature’s dynamism showed no tendency toward stopping, eternal and self-sustaining entropy, only restrained where it came up against humanity, at which point nature seems to give way, at least for a while. When nature yields to humanity, he showed humanity beginning to reflect nature.

A sharp comparison can be drawn with the timeless energy embodied in nature and the more tenuous energy embodied in man. This can be seen in the few scenes of humanity, which also include nature’s entropy. The clouds over the city and the scenes of worn-out people and places like the abandoned factories show the difference. The clouds are there forever, never changing in their essential qualities, whereas people and things wear out after only a short time.

There were several scenes that stood out to me as particularly sharp criticisms of man beyond the usual lamentation of self-destructiveness. The early scenes of humanity paint man as a destroyer, an agent of simplification. Through the aerial views of farms and cities, the replacement of the nearly subliminal patterns of nature with the simplistic and obvious patterns of man was made abundantly clear.

Mr. Reggio showed man’s challenge of nature’s monoliths with his own with a series of shots using minimizing camera angles and offset proportions. The self destructiveness of humanity was made obvious in the displays of weapons and explosions, but also in the scenes of masses of humanity, and the scenes of individuals to backdrops of chaos and humanity. He showed the faces of the faceless hordes of humanity in these scenes, and in these faces why man’s destructiveness must be mediated.

I am confused by his repeated use of scenes of space travel among scenes of self destruction, because the rocket used among the scenes of nuclear explosions was not a missile per say, but a NASA payload rocket. It seems to me that he was criticizing exploration of space, yet couldn’t that be a direction in which we could channel humanity’s energies, and to siphon off our destructive tendencies.

The music throughout the human sections seemed to me to display a sense of haste, fear, despair, but also hope and wonder buried in there. It lead me to believe that he does not think that humanity is beyond redemption, merely unwell.

I loved the symbolism in the nighttime scenes. While nature seems to become still at night, humanity, as shown through the moving lights, never even gains a semblance of calm. The lights seem to symbolize human activity outpacing human capacity for recognition, and they emphasize one thing. We need to stop from time to time, to devalue individualism and to revalue compassion. We need to look on humanity as a whole in order to develop the compassion that would make humanity worth the effort.

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