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Also this issue: Frida, Be Me The Player Screen Picks |
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October 31-November 6, 2002
movies
 Dolly in: A cloned sheep represents the perils of technology in Naqoyqatsi. |
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Closing out the Koyaanisqatsi trilogy.
Naqoyqatsi.
In an interview on the DVD of Koyaanisqatsi, the first in his trilogy of film-length tone poems, Christian Brother-turned-filmmaker Godfrey Reggio explains that he chose the title, a Hopi word translated as “life out of balance,” because he wanted a title with “no cultural baggage.” (Originally, he wanted to just use a symbol, a wordless title for a wordless film.) By contrast, Naqoyqatsi, translated as “life as war” or “civilized violence,” is nothing but baggage. While the other films were built around images captured from real life, modified only by the speed of the camera’s shutter, Naqoyqatsi’s images are either received or created. It conjures up storms of computerized ones and zeroes, or colors the African veldt pink and pale blue, the better to underline the way in which technology alters the way we see even those parts of the world of which it has no obvious effect.
The trouble is that what might have seemed prophetic nearly 20 years ago seems prosaic now. Koyaanisqatsi's time-lapse images of freeway traffic are the stuff of car commercials now, and more than once, Naqoyqatsi's parades of wayward symbols play like the opening credits to some mid-budget news program. Where Koyaanisqatsi and its sequel, Powaqqatsi, aimed to show the stuff of daily life from a different vantage point, creating new images of familiar settings, Naqoyqatsi starts with familiar images -- with the most familiar of images. Not just Ronald Reagan, but Ronald Reagan being shot; not just Martin Luther King Jr., but the "I have a dream" speech. At one point, Reggio contrives a scene of computer-generated celebrities ascending a virtual red carpet (a scene that unfortunately recalls the best-forgotten summer botch Simone), then switches to the real thing, which comes as a visceral shock. With the slow-down treatment of stars blowing air kisses to their fans, Reggio may be aiming for a comment on celebrity culture, but it's hard not to think, just for a second, "Hey! I know her!"
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As the series has progressed, the films have grown progressively more didactic. Koyaanisqatsi was sufficiently open-ended to be read as both a hymn to technology and a prescription for the end of the world. No such ambiguity bedevils Naqoyqatsi. As Philip Glass' music swells to a martial thrum (or the minimalist equivalent thereof), Reggio varispeeds footage of athletes screaming in victory, every last grimace and contortion rippling through their faces. The film's depiction of a society crashing into itself, of Rome before the fall, is powerful, but thin.
That said, it's not surprising that some of the late 20th century's most successful imagists have leant their imprimaturs (and, presumably, their cash) to Reggio's triptych: Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and, with this latest installment, Steven Soderbergh. (You can only hope for such grandeur in Soderbergh's upcoming Solaris.) Sure, it took Reggio and company 24 years to make three non-narrative, wordless, abstract films that could still, conceivably, be shown in shopping malls, but it's doubtful anyone else could have done it at all.
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