The Qatsi movies are feature-length, non-narrative films. They consist of stunning visuals and hypnotic music from minimalist composer Philip Glass. And yet, what keeps them from merely being 90-minute experiments is that each movie has form and structure. They show that film can be composed and arranged like music, instead of the more traditional storytelling approach.
Each of the three films has a message that is approximated in the Hopi language, and the resulting Hopi word becomes the title of the film. Naqoyqatsi, roughly translated, means "war as everyday living" or "life as war."
To make his case that "life is war," Reggio shows pictures of soldiers, of athletes, and of political dissidents. He shows military training footage, science films, and images of world leaders, footage from crash tests and commercials. He also shows images of technology and mass media. He looks closely at the violent or insane images that most of us take for granted every day.
The images in Naqoyqatsi mostly come from other sources. In one of the DVD's extra features, visual designer Jon Kane says that 80 per cent of the footage for Naqoyqatsi is found footage. Only 20 per cent was photographed specifically for the film.
For example, Reggio shows American soldiers in super slow motion, belting out a song. At these slow speeds, they appear to be in distress, mouths open wide, faces distorted, every breath racking their entire body. He also shows two athletes competing fiercely, again in super slow motion. These athletes are so intent on beating the other guy that they are apparently oblivious to two facts revealed in the image, first, that they are participating in the "Goodwill Games," and second, that they are both on the same team.
Perhaps the strangest image of all is a beautiful, healthy-looking blonde woman, also shown in super slow motion, holding a hamburger and laughing merrily. Finally, a serious, sultry look comes across her face as she leans down to take a bite. When she bites it, her face becomes almost orgasmic. Clearly, some advertising firm thought they hit visual paydirt with this actress' performance, but Reggio sees it as evidence that the world has gone mad. By slowing it down and taking out of context, it's easy to see Reggio's point of view. This healthy-looking blonde begins to look like an insane, Orwellian representative of McWorld.
Naqoyqatsi is darker than the other two movies in the trilogy, both literally and metaphorically. Where the other films were shot in bright daylight or neon-lit nighttime, Naqoyqatsi almost exclusively uses footage that has been run through a computer. Landscapes and people are shown in negative or with solarization filters, resulting in a world that never sees the sun.
Naqoyqatsi is also the first film in the trilogy to use images created specifically for the film. (For example, zeroes and ones form a three-dimensional wormhole through which the "camera" flies.) This is a mixed blessing. It frees Reggio to make his visual points more directly, but by using those tricks it feels like he's cheating. In the previous films, the message was backed up by photographic "evidence" from the real world. Whether or not you believed life was "out of balance" (as the Hopi word "koyaanisqatsi" suggests), the visual case was built from photographs of the world, and not from digital pixels.
Luckily, you don't have to buy into the message to appreciate these films. They can be viewed as pure composition and form -- film as music. They are symphonies made of images and sound, and not just sound alone.
Earlier this year, MGM released the first two films on DVD. Now Miramax has released Naqoyqatsi on DVD. In addition to a pristine picture and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound, the disc has several special features. Reggio and producer Steven Soderbergh introduce the movie in a segment called "Life is War." Composer Philip Glass and cellist Yo-Yo Ma talk about the music in a chapter called "Music of Naqoyqatsi." Most impressively, the disc includes a 55-minute panel discussion at NYU wherein Reggio, Glass, and Visual Designer Jon Kane go into detail about the making and meaning of Naqoyqatsi.
To order Naqoyqatsi, go to TCM Shopping.
by Marty Mapes
