The Message is the Medium: Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi come to DVD - Page 3

The problem with movies is that since the talkies the film industry has historically been conservative and word-oriented. The three-act play has been the model. It's time to abandon the conventional view of the movie as an extension of the three-act play. Too many people over thirty are still word-oriented rather than picture-oriented.Speaking of pictures, MGM certainly did a nice job transferring these two films to DVD. The images on Koyanasqatsi are starting to show their age a bit: this is after all, a twenty year old film, which uses a fair amount of stock footage in its arsenal of cinemagraphic techniques. In contrast, the colors of 1988's Powaqqatsi literally pop off the screen, such as the South American woman near the beginning of the film in the most brilliant blood red dress imaginable.

The Music Makes The Images Dance

Arguably even more stunning than the transfer of Koyaanisqatsi's images is the remix of Philip Glass's score into 5.1 sound. Koyaanisqatsi would be an entirely different film, and quite probably a far worse one, without Glass's music. It makes those images come alive and dance: what Fred Astaire did for dancing bodies on film, Reggio and his editors do for the images themselves--they pulsate and whirl like Sufi dervishes to Glass's music. And the Latin percussion on Glass's score for Powaqqatsi is, if anything, more spectacular, with a huge spread across all the speakers of the 5.1 system--and powerful, thumping bass. Be careful--under the opening titles, there's a low frequency note that can shake your home theater apart!

While it's easy for me to find fault with Koyaanisqatsi's message, it's least it has one. Powaaqtsi seems much more like a hip update of the sorts of travelogues that studios used to put out in the 1930s and 40s: see the atmospheric scenery and indigenous peoples of far-off cultures! Note the happy primitives going about their lives in harmony with nature! (If the UN needed a music video for their recent, disastrous "Sustainability Conference" in Johannesburg, Powaqqatsi would have been perfect. Who knows--it may have even inspired it on some level.) If there's a plot to Powaqqatsi (beyond its obvious and shopworn theme of the corrupting pervasiveness of the US), it's much, much more diffuse than Koyaanisqatsi. Although it's telling how much happier many of noble savages and primitives shown in Powaqqatsi are to the bourgeois Americans in Koyaanisqatsi--but it may not be the message that Reggio intends. Film--especially for the propagandist--is all about editing and selection. And it's a mirror of its creator.

Article Author: Ed Driscoll

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