Koyaanisqatsi speaks without language. A montage of imagery, the shots create visual poetry, a sort of nature documentary absent of a narrator. The shots are bigger than life, taken from the air above natural wonders, or condensing the time of a day into seconds. Just watching, you feel the power of nature, and time. Koyaanisqatsi makes observations that allow the Earth to speak for itself, so eloquently - its own voice.
I mean: that for good reason, the government selected Koyaanisqatsi for preservation by the National Film Registry, listing it as, ""culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Koyaanisqatsi captures some of our most important history and packs it into the length of a feature film. The director, Godfrey Reggio, used artistic observation as a means of documenting the natural world and included humans, and civilization, in that definition of "natural world." Though, the film's perspective so alters your previous perceptions of our planet that you almost feel inhuman just watching it, and that's the point. In an interview, Reggio gave purpose to his choice of music over language, stating that music and images communicate to all people, without discriminating. With Philip Glass as composer, and Ron Fricke as cinematographer, it's not hard to speak without words. The result of the collaboration between these men is an amazing human achievement.
Then, it's no surprise Godfrey Reggio spent fourteen years in fasting, silence and prayer in part of his training with a group of Christian monks. After so much time in isolation away from mainstream civilization, he decided to make movies. In other words, he spent fourteen years exerting the entirety of his soul towards a specialized spiritual cause, abandoned that cause, and immediately picked up a camera so he could go off and document the world. Who wouldn't want to know what that man has to say?
Apparently, most people. Koyaanisqatsi was the first film of a trilogy, all of which films have struggled, for years, to find distribution. I'll remind you: the Library of Congress chose this film to be preserved, for as long as possible. Still, almost no one knows what "Koyaanisqatsi" is, and fewer have had the immense privilege of experiencing it. ...At least it's sitting in a vault somewhere.
