"Koyaanisqatsi" - Life out of Balance

Josh
Sep 24, 2024
3 min read

Updated: Sep 25, 2024

Godfrey Reggio (1982)

A must see experimental experience.

A crazy life, a life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living. A definition that perfectly fits the title, Koyaanisqatsi. The experimental documentary by Godfrey Reggio is a true experience. A film that draws you in with a narrative with no dialogue, allowing the audience to interrupt the documentary how they want through the Kuleshov effect. Ultimately, Koyannisqatsi shows us the world like you’ve never truly seen it. It’s a movie that gets the audience to ‘stop and smell the roses’, to stop, really look and take in the world we live in. Showing us vast vistas to the mundane nature of everyday life.

Despite having no narration or guiding voice, your tour guide through this narrative is the music and edits. We open on a cave painting. Humanities first message to the future, proof they were here. To then cut to something cold and blue but no form can be made out. Until a blast of smoke and fire reveal a rocket. Arguably one of the most important achievements in human history. A testament to what we can achieve but also a glimpse at the future of possibilities. So we experience the in-between. The everyday unexciting accomplishments for humanity.

The first act has us enjoying the Earth. We have a beautiful shot of everything that makes up where we live. Deserts, oceans, mountains, clouds and caves. And these shots are breath-taking. You have to wonder how long they waited to get the perfect lighting, shadows and scenarios. Special mention to a sequence showing a time-lapse of clouds moving like waves above a mountain top. Then we get an explosive introduction to, essentially our villain, humanity. Harvesting the world and erecting straight metallic structures contrasting with the naturally formed terraforms that took centuries to forge.

And here we see humanity in a modern era, surrounded by straight lines, glass monoliths, concrete and metal. It’s amazing to really look at the mundane actions that we take everyday and see it from a new perspective in a symphony of movement. And it's a weird sensation that we’ve watched people just go about their lives, caught and memorialized in this film, yet viewed from a perspective that makes everyone look like insects. Bees or ants. And as we see more and more of the day to day lives of random people, the music and editing begins to speed up. Watching busy streets, factories evolving to not require humans, nightlife and time-lapses of driving through neon lit streets almost turning into futurist stargate (reminiscent of 2001: A space odyssey) but then come to a halt. This sequence almost gave me a panic attack, which feels intentional as it reminds you to slow down. We’ve gone from cave paintings to all this hustle and bustle within such a small period of time and then pulled back showing how insignificant all of it is.

Moving to our final act, showing a prediction for the future. In a brilliant transition from a birds eye view of the city to a circuit board. Showing piles upon piles of information as pixels on a screen. Where we eventually circle back to where we all started. Simple cave paintings.

I could go through a list out every detail about this documentary and how it made me feel and what I thought it all meant. But I would simply recommend experiencing it for yourself. This does what a movie should do, have you walk away with an experience that gives you a new perspective on everything. Like great pieces of art, your perspective on the art will change as you do. I can easily see a pessimistic person watching this and hating humanity. Someone a bit more optimistic can see this as a love letter to humanity. And after seeing this, it's reminded me to just slow down and bring balance back into a life that's surrounded by the man-made.