Koyaanisqatsi

This film has influenced me in what i would want to acheive.


KOYAANISQATSI, Reggio's debut as a film director and producer, is the first film of the QATSI trilogy. The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance." 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. The musical score was composed by Philip Glass.


Koyaanisqatsi attempts to reveal the beauty of the beast! We usually perceive our world, our way of living, as beautiful because there is nothing else to perceive. If one lives in this world, the globalised world of high technology, all one can see is one layer of commodity piled upon another. In our world the "original" is the proliferation of the standardised. Copies are copies of copies. There seems to be no ability to see beyond, to see that we have encased ourselves in an artificial environment that has remarkably replaced the original, nature itself. We do not live with nature any longer; we live above it, off of it as it were. Nature has become the resource to keep this artificial or new nature alive.


With this film it is dellivered in an artistic way where you can take back thought and see what you make of it, or what it meant to you. This is the sort of effect i would like to achieve in my work, feeling out of balance, uncomfortable and not telling you what it is, but there for you to decided what it is. 




I think about this film alot, and it's meanings, how i feel about the world and i think it relates. It depresses me how humanity has evolved so quickly and most wouldn't even realise it. I think that we have gone too ahead of ourselves, and i know we aren't designed by nature to think for the future, but i can't see humans existing longer than another 100 years with out something catastrophic happening. If you ever get a chance to read this book do, it is outstanding how many things you learn which is at the same time repulsive. Rainforests are estimated to be extinct in 90 years and at least 3 atomic bombs to kill off a large percentage of population is estimated in the next 200 years or so. I have been heavily influenced by work and books that propose ideas on society these days, that if men didn't take take take, and women were more incontrol, the world would be more nurturing and wouldn't be creating fucking nuclear war arms.