Directed by Godfrey Reggio with breathtaking cinematography by Ron Fricke, Koyaanisqatsi was made in the afterglow of the environmental movement of 1970s. It was the first in a trilogy which eventually included 1988's Powaqqatsi ("life in transformation") and Naqoyqatsi ("life as war") released in 2002. It took Reggio six years, beginning in the mid-1970s, to travel across the country with Fricke shooting the striking, elegant images for Koyaanisqatsi. Reggio, a former Catholic monk, had been making shorts about technology and surveillance for the Institute for Regional Education, a New Mexico nonprofit focused on media activism, which provided partial funding for the project. Director Francis Ford Coppola also helped finance and distribute the film and was credited as producer. It was at Coppola's suggestion that the cave pictographs bookended the film.
Reggio approached avant-garde composer Philip Glass, who had never before composed music for a film, about scoring Koyaanisqatsi. Glass had not been interested in creating motion picture scores, assuming that film was a director's medium, with the composer being a minor player. But according to New York Times music critic John Rockwell, Reggio assured Glass that he would be very much a collaborator. The director showed the composer some of the unedited footage, and the two began to discuss how they would work together to determine the dramatic arc of the film. Glass ended up scoring the two subsequent films in Reggio's trilogy, as well as other more conventional Hollywood productions.
By the time Reggio completed and released Koyaanisqatsi in the early 1980s, its moment had passed. Reviews were enthusiastic about the film's visual and musical inventiveness, but seemed to dismiss its environmental message as somewhat dated and shallow. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "an invitation to knee-jerk environmentalism of the most superficial kind." But he added that it is "an impressive visual and listening experience....and a curious throwback to the 1960s when it would have been a short subject to be viewed through a marijuana haze." New York Times critic Vincent Canby, while praising the film's images and music, was more dismissive: "[It] is a slick, naive, chic, maddening, sometimes very beautiful movie that, if it were a book, would look great on a coffee table....As non-narrative films go, it is remarkably seductive, but so are the color photographs in the National Geographic."
It took Reggio another two decades to complete the trilogy. In a 2002 interview at the time of the release of Naqoyqatsi, Reggio recalled the mixed reactions to Koyaanisqatsi, calling it "an experience, rather than an idea. For some people, it's an environmental film. For some, it's an ode to technology. For some people, it's a piece of s**t. Or it moves people deeply. It depends on who you ask. It is the journey that is the objective." Today, more than three decades after it was made, when the balance in the natural world is ever more precarious, the music and the beauty of the film's images remain luminous, and the environmental message of Koyaanisqatsi seems prescient and increasingly urgent.
Producer/Director: Godfrey Reggio
Writers: Godfrey Reggio, Ron Fricke
Cinematography: Ron Fricke
Editor: Alton Walpole, Ron Fricke
Music: Philip Glass
by Margarita Landazuri
