Directed by Al Reinert
Music by Brian Eno
Edited by Susan Korda
Produced by Betsy Broyles Breier, Al Reinert, Ben Young Mason, Fred Miller
For All Mankind is a cinematic blend of all the different facets of the Apollo Program which put the first human beings on the moon. It isn't about any one Apollo odyssey, nor does it focus on individual astronauts, scientists, or ground control operators. Rather it is a synthesis in sound and images of what the Apollo Program means to the human species as a whole. Or maybe I should say it's what the filmmakers think the Apollo Program means to humankind as a whole, although I found it pretty convincing as well. I wanted to believe the grand mythology that director Al Reinert had crafted out of hours of footage shot on board the spacecraft by the astronauts themselves and the soundtrack rendered from a blend of Brian Eno's subtle musical score and one-on-one audio interviews with various astronauts from different Apollo missions. Visually, the movie appears to track one roundtrip journey to the moon and back, but this journey is pieced together out of elements of various Apollo missions, including some perilous moments from the abortive but heroic Apollo 13 mission (Hollywood director Ron Howard's megahit Apollo 13 does a pretty good job of dramatizing that mission). The result is a kind of Ultimate Apollo Mission where any obstacle or malfunction can be overcome by the combined talents of astronauts and ground control operators working in near-mystical synchronization.
So For All Mankind isn't exactly an objective portrayal of the Apollo Program as a whole, nor does it depict any one mission in any great chronological and/or technical detail. It doesn't ask any hard policy questions about why America should've spent so much money on the project, or its value as a propaganda weapon against our grand Cold War nemesis the Soviet Union. The movie is more of an essay about the spirit of the Apollo Program, the dream, the myth. The filmmakers, led by director Reinert, want to convince you of the deeper, possibly even spiritual, value of humanity's journey into space. When I say spiritual, I don't mean to suggest that the movie is advocating any sort of religion or body of spiritual practice or some kind of a New Age thing, but rather the notion that people, as individuals, families, societies, nations, can put themselves in the service of some larger principle and derive a benefit from that service. It's a vision of collective action that would no doubt be shouted down as "Socialism" by many Americans in elected office today. But then again, about half, maybe more, of our elected officials do not believe in evolution or birth control or free speech or reason or logic so we don't have to pay attention to those people.
Or maybe we do.
Reinert begins with President John F. Kennedy's famous speech laying down the challenge of getting to the moon within the decade, and the discovery of new rights, new frontiers, new vistas, for all humankind. JFK offers up the space program, and the quest to land on the moon by the end of the 1960s, as a kind of national program of self-improvement, a dream to strive for that will shake Americans up, get them to aim high. I am not usually moved by the words of politicians, and JFK lived and died before I was ever conceived, but I found myself wanting to believe the words. Hard to believe that this is the same man who was pretty eager to rain fire on Vietnam (along with Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon, Kissinger, McNamara, Westmoreland, the Democrats, the Republicans, and many others, so, no, I'm not just picking on JFK here). JFK, from what I've seen of him, had a way with words, strong symmetrical facial features, and his speech seems to conflate humanity's adventure into space with the struggle for universal human rights as embodied at the time by the African-American struggle for Civil Rights. It's a noble vision later picked up on by Star Trek in its various incarnations: all of the cultural and ethnic flavors of humanity united as one Federation in the pursuit of a more perfect intergalactic union--a worthy dream that humanity is still struggling to attain.
The movie goes from Kennedy's speech directly into the preparations for launch: spacesuit diagnostics, checklists, tense men chain smoking and guzzling coffee in the control room, then blast off--and we are well into the journey. The words of politicians cannot compare with the experiential majesty of riding a rocket to the moon, floating in space while tethered to a vehicle moving at 25,000 mph, skipping along like children on the barren surface of the moon--and I think that's what gives For All Mankind it's peculiar power, for all of its surface myth-making. That raw experience that transforms humans who dare to leave the Earth. And how these first adventurers open up possibilities for all who would follow. It's also that raw experience which imbues the astronauts, and this movie, with that spirit I've already spoken of: one's life, mind, and perspective on the Earth and the universe are all transformed once you see the homeworld hanging in the sublime dark of outer space.
Each stage of a trip from the Earth to the moon is depicted, with a great deal of humor and humanity, which caught me off guard. I expected it to be more of a technical exposition, but director Reinert takes the material in a poetic direction, and also brings in a lot of warmth and humor by his choice of footage: astronauts bouncing around their spaceship listening to Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, and Frank Sinatra; the ecstasy of the aforementioned tethered space walk; the childlike skipping and hopping of astronauts bouncing around the moon; and joyriding about the magnificent wastes in the lunar rover. I was left with the impression from both the film that the astronauts shot while out in space, and from the interview voice overs that these guys really loved what they were doing. A lot of times, I think astronauts come off as squares, as people so heavily trained and indoctrinated in the technical aspects of space flight (and it is enormously technical), and the individual personas of astronauts are so stage managed by NASA and other space agencies, that they end up unintentionally making the whole adventure of humanity into space seem dull, routine, just another job--maybe even the ultimate exercise in conformity conditioning. But the truth is that these guys have to be rigorously trained to get it right, to survive in the pitiless void of space. And in America at the time of the Apollo Program any taxpayer funded venture has to present a conservative, straight-laced front to get the money it needs. Deep down these astronauts have a lot of passion, and a lot of balls, then and now, and I've always secretly admired the men and women, from space programs all over the world, who have a desire to travel into space. Yes, I admire these people, even though I am also certain I would not get along with many of them, personally, especially the old guys still around from the Apollo Program. But that's all right. We don't have to get along, or know each other personally, just as long as people keep going into space.
The dream of the Apollo Program, JFK's noble speech--were such things ever really said or done in America? Watching this movie, reflecting on what I've read in history books, and thinking about the small stretch of American history I've observed during my relatively brief adulthood I found myself disbelieving what I was seeing and hearing. This movie struck me as much of a piece of science fiction as a Lensman novel or something by Heinlein, Asimov, or Clarke. I can't imagine America today, with its partisan gridlock, rampant anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, and contempt for true community and collective endeavor ever attaining the stars. But maybe it's not fair to just trash America, in this respect. Factions and wars and bigotries and fatal bitterness of all kinds engulf many parts of the world as we speak. I've said it before, I'll say it again: I'm a pessimist. I do not believe humanity has the right stuff. I do not think we'll make it to the stars. But watching this movie made me want to believe.
For All Mankind, I repeat, is an exercise in mythmaking that borders on propaganda. But it's not propaganda for some self-serving political faction, or an ambitious individual, or any one nation state, or even necessarily for the Apollo Program astronauts or NASA itself. It is propaganda in service to a dream of infinite adventure and enlightenment for the human species.
Showing posts with label American Documentary Films. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American Documentary Films. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Saturday, September 8, 2012
MOVIE REVIEW: NAQOYQATSI: LIFE AS WAR (2002)
Written and Directed by Godfrey Reggio
Music by Phillip Glass
Cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma
Conductor Michael Riesman
Music and Soundtrack Producer Kurt Munkacsi
Editor and Visual Designer Jon Kane
Director of Photography Russell Lee Fine
Producers Joe Beirne, Godfrey Reggio, Lawrence Taub
Co-Producer Mel Lawrence
Executive Producer Steven Soderbergh
Music by Phillip Glass
Cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma
Conductor Michael Riesman
Music and Soundtrack Producer Kurt Munkacsi
Editor and Visual Designer Jon Kane
Director of Photography Russell Lee Fine
Producers Joe Beirne, Godfrey Reggio, Lawrence Taub
Co-Producer Mel Lawrence
Executive Producer Steven Soderbergh
Review by William D. Tucker.
The first thing we see is the mythic Tower of Babel. Perhaps we are meant to reflect on languages, communication, how human beings have been divided from one another by different ways of speaking, believing, living, dying, worshipping. We zoom into the Tower of Babel, and find ourselves floating through bombed out apartment blocs and office buildings, the mythic surface giving way to something all-too-real and contemporary. As the movie progresses we are subjected to imagery of computer models of life, humanity, chemistry, climate, weather, the quantification of every aspect of nature. Nature is brought under the control of ultra-technology. Life is designed and decanted according to precise specifications. War is the new engine of evolution, a Hobbesian combat of all-against-all. I think back to the Tower of Babel. It would seem, in retrospect, to presage the failure of humans not just to communicate, but also the failure to take control of our own destiny as one species sharing one planet. We've handed the command and control functions over to the Machine. It is our new God, Monarch, Executive, Supreme Being, whatever. But is this wrong? Is it right? Did we ever really have a choice? Are we guided by pure instinct, even when it comes to technology? Must we always do that which is possible, no matter the consequences? Only one thing is for sure: there are going to be a lot of dead bodies . . .
Godfrey Reggio brings his documentary/myth-cycle of human technological conquest of nature to a disquieting, perhaps transhumanist, conclusion in Naqoyqatsi: Life as War. In the first movie, Koyaanisqatsi, the imagery and music depicted late twentieth century humanity's development of weapons of mass destruction, urban sprawl, and a nascent world-around computer network. Koyaanisqatsi was mostly from the perspective of the conquerors: the USA, the Soviet Union, Madison Avenue, and sundry defense contractors and petroleum companies, with some sequences depicting the dehumanizing processes of mass entertainment, Las Vegas, and supermax prison-style housing projects. During one bravura, darkly comedic sequence various frenetic human activities--disco dancing, hot dog manufacturing, sped-up automobile traffic--are all integrated into a giant computer chip, suggesting the triumph of rationalized mass production techniques applied on a maximal scale to all aspects of human existence. The second movie was Powaqqatsi, which focused on the human wreckage of the processes set into motion in Koyaanisqatsi. Powaqqatsi was not as direct as the first movie in how it chose to tell its tale, but rather took a roundabout approach, showing the march of techno-conquest from the perspective of the peoples and nations being trampled and exploited for slave labor to service the new globalized post-nature regime.
Naqoyqatsi, like the previous two movies in the trilogy, is, in form, a kind of experimental documentary consisting of provocative imagery cut together in an unconventional form, and set to Philip Glass's sublime and ominous original score. Yo-Yo Ma's solos add a mournful, elegiac quality to the soundscape. It is not an activist movie or a conventional political movie, although it is tempting to interpret it in such terms. It does not push any political platform or candidate, nor does it give any easy answers to the systems and dilemmas it illustrates. Rather, it offers an alternative paradigm to what we typically see in human political discourse, especially in the United States. It offers up no bogus messianic heroes or self-serving morality or unconvincing conservative/liberal outrage. What it does offer is a systemic portrait of human civilization being dominated and transformed into a civilization of cyborgs and replicants who are pitted against each other in merciless, factional combat. For those who do not cotton to gladiatorial exertions, there are also the consolations of consumerism and nostalgic, retro-pop fantasy delusions. It uses a mixture of original documentarian footage, computer graphics, and even footage from Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi remixed and ret-tinted for a new era. Like the previous two movies it does not have a conventional linear narrative, although this one is perhaps more linear than the other two. Its soundtrack and imagery invites the viewer to create their own narrative interpretations wthin certain parameters, and is not a movie meant to be taken passively. You must think through what you're watching, resist it even, and draw your own conclusions. This blog post constitutes my own personal ruminations about watching Naqoyqatsi. If you've never seen the movie I'm not sure it's possible to spoil it, but I would recommend you watch it. Reading a review of it is not the same as actually seeing it.
Naqoyqatsi zips into the depths of a twenty-first century where all human life and enterprise is directed towards the purpose of war eternal, a global village of Olympian warriors stripped of unnecessary emotions, and ready to kill and die at a moment's notice for their corporate/governmental/ideological/religious masters. The world-girdling computer network of Koyannisqatsi has evolved into something like the hegemonic machine system of those Matrix movies: every human being is now plugged into his/her very own virtual identity/reality tunnel. Each warrior-citizen (think Roy Batty and Pris and the other replicants from Blade Runner) is locked into his own private trip of fantasy-empowerment. Each one man/woman army has been hypnotized into believing that they fight for whatever flag/nation/faith/professional sports team/pop cultural icon suits them, whatever keeps them marching, killing, consuming, the whole range of options has been determined and offered up in user-friendly, highly intuitive menus of easily understood icons and graphical interfaces by a system of perfect control. This system seems to be the final flowering of the march of technological conquest. All life is now pitted in a brutal competition to see who is fit to survive and be modified into a transcendent new species fit to conquer the universe.
How does the system determine how to select and modify appropriate life forms? Well, the genomic data of all life has now be rigorously quantified. Custom organisms can be decanted, tested, and, if necessary, put down, and tossed back into the manufacturing cycle. Weather and climate patterns can now be modeled with powerful computer systems. The movie seems obsessed with images of the quantification and regimentation of life and nature: soldiers marching in lockstep; full body scans feeding into precise computer models of life; computer models of hurricanes and waves breaking on shore; appetite, desire, lust, love, hate are all analyzed according to the infallible metrics of the global capitalist marketplace.
Belief has also been cracked. Nation states, ideology, and religion have been reduced to click-through icons on a screen. The great moral leaders, celebrities, heads of state, and thinkers have been transformed into clipjob TV retrospective hallucinations and, in one eerie, extended sequence, a procession of tragic wax figures. Yassir Arafat, Billy Graham, George W. Bush, Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Pope John Paul II, Princess Di, Sitting Bull, Donald Trump, Jackie O., Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Ted Turner, and others are all depicted as a succession of wax statues. It's pretty damn creepy to watch. It is also weirdly reassuring: capitalists, crooks, geniuses, civil rights heroes, warmongers, communists, deciders, martyrs--we all end up in the same wax museum in the sky. So don't beat yourself up if your life isn't quite going the way you want it to, okay? You'll get your wax statue, too, in the end.
Hmm. Maybe that's not reassuring at all! Some of these people do not deserve to be in the same company as Martin Luther King or Gandhi or Einstein or Sitting Bull. Then again, that flattening out of the moral dimensions, the reduction of a wide range of people to a pantheon of sheer fame--maybe it's a new mutation of Warhol's pop-art transcendence, 15 minutes of fame, all that. Now, we all get a chance to choose a world famous avatar from times gone by, never mind our own individual dreams and schemes. Never mind what a given avatar might have fought for, stood for, believed in--they were famous! And now they've been stripped of all that pesky ambiguity, struggle, and morality for good or ill, destruction or creation! Now you can co-opt that fame with one click of an icon! In this process, we see a new scale of dehumanization: the true end of history, where all the beings that come along after a certain lock-down point are no longer active participants in their own lives, but are just assets of the perfect system of control. Grim stuff.
Maybe a little paranoid, too. I can't help but feel there's something goofy about a movie,which is a high technological product, being used to offer up a strident critical view of a technological dystopia. Godfrey Reggio has said that he decided to use technological means to create the Qatsi movies because you have to play on the terms of the dominant techno-culture if you want your message to break through to people. Makes sense, but there is a weird tension, for me, when watching these Qatsi movies. I can't tell if they're mere paranoid, Luddite doomsday fantasies or if they're dead-on correct about the state of the world. After all, doomsday fantasies are a way of reassuring oneself: life sucks, everything is fucked, why worry? I know what's going on!
Sort of like conspiracy theories: connect enough dots, make enough accusations, no one can be trusted, but the truth is still out there, so I'll just share my grand insights with a select few people--for we are the chosen ones! Only we know the truth! And we're gonna publish our own books, and magazines, and hold conferences--and say fuck all to the mainstream media which is all under Illuminati/Bilderberger/Trilateral/John Birch Society/Cthulhuoid control!
Okay, okay, the Qatsi movies aren't really conspiracy flicks. But it seems to me that conspiracy nuts and doomsayers (full disclosure: I'm a bit of a doomsayer myself) have a few things in common. Also, watching the Qatsi movies feels, at times, like a secret, underground education. Like having your eyes opened by Morpheus in The Matrix. Or could it be that the Qatsi trilogy is a tool of the Illuminati?! (gasps)
But seriously: what gives Reggio's Qatsi trilogy its strength is its systemic long-view of human techno-conquest. These aren't conspiracy rants, but rather they constitute a free form analysis of what you might call the human technological instinct. Our seemingly innate drive to modify the environment and create tools and our capacity for pattern seeking, systemic methods of thought has led us to great scientific breakthroughs, grand works of art, engineering, and architecture, and advances in medicine which have improved the quality of our lives on this planet.
But our capacity for systemic thought and quantitative scientific endeavor has also created the atom bomb, industrial pollution, vast inequalities of wealth and healthcare, mass slaughter via wars and genocides, and the potential for the creation of new super-viruses and bacteria via the uncontrolled use of antibiotics and designer pathogens. There's no way we can live without technology at this point, and yet it seems to be impossible to control. Reggio's Qatsi movies don't offer up any easy solutions or heroes. They are portraits of the world as it is in all its complexity. Naqoyqatsi seems to be a vision of the near future. So maybe Naqoyqatsi is a little bit more of a cautionary tale than the other two. With this third Qatsi movie, there's more of a sense that the future it depicts hasn't quite happened yet, that maybe we can take another path.
The closing images of Naqoyqatsi are redolent with a dark kind of hope: footage of human skydivers who seem to defy gravity, who seem to fly. Could these flying people be the fruit of some sort of transhumanist selective breeding program? Could all the conflict and strife and mass slaughter be bending towards the production of a new, superior form of humanity, suited to existing beyond the confines of the earth?
Or is it another fevered delusion born of human arrogance and cruelty? After all, skydivers only look like they're flying. They're actually plummeting at great speed towards the dirt.
Maybe these final images are meant to suggest our own towering delusions as a species, our collective fantasies of conquest, empowerment, of techno-immortality . . . These final images also seem to echo the falling rocket debris from the end of Koyaanisqatsi.
Maybe, with this third and final Qatsi movie, we are at the end of the human dream of absolute power over nature. For that matter, maybe we have also reached the end of our collective fantasy that technology serves us as a tool, and we must now wake up to the fact that we are carried along by the techno-instinct as much as or even more than we have any control over it. Maybe we can't change our fate as a species, but at least we have some idea of what's coming. The first two Qatsi movies were trailers for the world as it once was in the time that those movies were made, preparing their audiences for contact with stark reality. Naqoyqatsi is a trailer for a merciless future that we cannot resist or change. Here's hoping Godfrey Reggio didn't get it all right . . .
The first thing we see is the mythic Tower of Babel. Perhaps we are meant to reflect on languages, communication, how human beings have been divided from one another by different ways of speaking, believing, living, dying, worshipping. We zoom into the Tower of Babel, and find ourselves floating through bombed out apartment blocs and office buildings, the mythic surface giving way to something all-too-real and contemporary. As the movie progresses we are subjected to imagery of computer models of life, humanity, chemistry, climate, weather, the quantification of every aspect of nature. Nature is brought under the control of ultra-technology. Life is designed and decanted according to precise specifications. War is the new engine of evolution, a Hobbesian combat of all-against-all. I think back to the Tower of Babel. It would seem, in retrospect, to presage the failure of humans not just to communicate, but also the failure to take control of our own destiny as one species sharing one planet. We've handed the command and control functions over to the Machine. It is our new God, Monarch, Executive, Supreme Being, whatever. But is this wrong? Is it right? Did we ever really have a choice? Are we guided by pure instinct, even when it comes to technology? Must we always do that which is possible, no matter the consequences? Only one thing is for sure: there are going to be a lot of dead bodies . . .
Godfrey Reggio brings his documentary/myth-cycle of human technological conquest of nature to a disquieting, perhaps transhumanist, conclusion in Naqoyqatsi: Life as War. In the first movie, Koyaanisqatsi, the imagery and music depicted late twentieth century humanity's development of weapons of mass destruction, urban sprawl, and a nascent world-around computer network. Koyaanisqatsi was mostly from the perspective of the conquerors: the USA, the Soviet Union, Madison Avenue, and sundry defense contractors and petroleum companies, with some sequences depicting the dehumanizing processes of mass entertainment, Las Vegas, and supermax prison-style housing projects. During one bravura, darkly comedic sequence various frenetic human activities--disco dancing, hot dog manufacturing, sped-up automobile traffic--are all integrated into a giant computer chip, suggesting the triumph of rationalized mass production techniques applied on a maximal scale to all aspects of human existence. The second movie was Powaqqatsi, which focused on the human wreckage of the processes set into motion in Koyaanisqatsi. Powaqqatsi was not as direct as the first movie in how it chose to tell its tale, but rather took a roundabout approach, showing the march of techno-conquest from the perspective of the peoples and nations being trampled and exploited for slave labor to service the new globalized post-nature regime.
Naqoyqatsi, like the previous two movies in the trilogy, is, in form, a kind of experimental documentary consisting of provocative imagery cut together in an unconventional form, and set to Philip Glass's sublime and ominous original score. Yo-Yo Ma's solos add a mournful, elegiac quality to the soundscape. It is not an activist movie or a conventional political movie, although it is tempting to interpret it in such terms. It does not push any political platform or candidate, nor does it give any easy answers to the systems and dilemmas it illustrates. Rather, it offers an alternative paradigm to what we typically see in human political discourse, especially in the United States. It offers up no bogus messianic heroes or self-serving morality or unconvincing conservative/liberal outrage. What it does offer is a systemic portrait of human civilization being dominated and transformed into a civilization of cyborgs and replicants who are pitted against each other in merciless, factional combat. For those who do not cotton to gladiatorial exertions, there are also the consolations of consumerism and nostalgic, retro-pop fantasy delusions. It uses a mixture of original documentarian footage, computer graphics, and even footage from Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi remixed and ret-tinted for a new era. Like the previous two movies it does not have a conventional linear narrative, although this one is perhaps more linear than the other two. Its soundtrack and imagery invites the viewer to create their own narrative interpretations wthin certain parameters, and is not a movie meant to be taken passively. You must think through what you're watching, resist it even, and draw your own conclusions. This blog post constitutes my own personal ruminations about watching Naqoyqatsi. If you've never seen the movie I'm not sure it's possible to spoil it, but I would recommend you watch it. Reading a review of it is not the same as actually seeing it.
Naqoyqatsi zips into the depths of a twenty-first century where all human life and enterprise is directed towards the purpose of war eternal, a global village of Olympian warriors stripped of unnecessary emotions, and ready to kill and die at a moment's notice for their corporate/governmental/ideological/religious masters. The world-girdling computer network of Koyannisqatsi has evolved into something like the hegemonic machine system of those Matrix movies: every human being is now plugged into his/her very own virtual identity/reality tunnel. Each warrior-citizen (think Roy Batty and Pris and the other replicants from Blade Runner) is locked into his own private trip of fantasy-empowerment. Each one man/woman army has been hypnotized into believing that they fight for whatever flag/nation/faith/professional sports team/pop cultural icon suits them, whatever keeps them marching, killing, consuming, the whole range of options has been determined and offered up in user-friendly, highly intuitive menus of easily understood icons and graphical interfaces by a system of perfect control. This system seems to be the final flowering of the march of technological conquest. All life is now pitted in a brutal competition to see who is fit to survive and be modified into a transcendent new species fit to conquer the universe.
How does the system determine how to select and modify appropriate life forms? Well, the genomic data of all life has now be rigorously quantified. Custom organisms can be decanted, tested, and, if necessary, put down, and tossed back into the manufacturing cycle. Weather and climate patterns can now be modeled with powerful computer systems. The movie seems obsessed with images of the quantification and regimentation of life and nature: soldiers marching in lockstep; full body scans feeding into precise computer models of life; computer models of hurricanes and waves breaking on shore; appetite, desire, lust, love, hate are all analyzed according to the infallible metrics of the global capitalist marketplace.
Belief has also been cracked. Nation states, ideology, and religion have been reduced to click-through icons on a screen. The great moral leaders, celebrities, heads of state, and thinkers have been transformed into clipjob TV retrospective hallucinations and, in one eerie, extended sequence, a procession of tragic wax figures. Yassir Arafat, Billy Graham, George W. Bush, Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Pope John Paul II, Princess Di, Sitting Bull, Donald Trump, Jackie O., Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Ted Turner, and others are all depicted as a succession of wax statues. It's pretty damn creepy to watch. It is also weirdly reassuring: capitalists, crooks, geniuses, civil rights heroes, warmongers, communists, deciders, martyrs--we all end up in the same wax museum in the sky. So don't beat yourself up if your life isn't quite going the way you want it to, okay? You'll get your wax statue, too, in the end.
Hmm. Maybe that's not reassuring at all! Some of these people do not deserve to be in the same company as Martin Luther King or Gandhi or Einstein or Sitting Bull. Then again, that flattening out of the moral dimensions, the reduction of a wide range of people to a pantheon of sheer fame--maybe it's a new mutation of Warhol's pop-art transcendence, 15 minutes of fame, all that. Now, we all get a chance to choose a world famous avatar from times gone by, never mind our own individual dreams and schemes. Never mind what a given avatar might have fought for, stood for, believed in--they were famous! And now they've been stripped of all that pesky ambiguity, struggle, and morality for good or ill, destruction or creation! Now you can co-opt that fame with one click of an icon! In this process, we see a new scale of dehumanization: the true end of history, where all the beings that come along after a certain lock-down point are no longer active participants in their own lives, but are just assets of the perfect system of control. Grim stuff.
Maybe a little paranoid, too. I can't help but feel there's something goofy about a movie,which is a high technological product, being used to offer up a strident critical view of a technological dystopia. Godfrey Reggio has said that he decided to use technological means to create the Qatsi movies because you have to play on the terms of the dominant techno-culture if you want your message to break through to people. Makes sense, but there is a weird tension, for me, when watching these Qatsi movies. I can't tell if they're mere paranoid, Luddite doomsday fantasies or if they're dead-on correct about the state of the world. After all, doomsday fantasies are a way of reassuring oneself: life sucks, everything is fucked, why worry? I know what's going on!
Sort of like conspiracy theories: connect enough dots, make enough accusations, no one can be trusted, but the truth is still out there, so I'll just share my grand insights with a select few people--for we are the chosen ones! Only we know the truth! And we're gonna publish our own books, and magazines, and hold conferences--and say fuck all to the mainstream media which is all under Illuminati/Bilderberger/Trilateral/John Birch Society/Cthulhuoid control!
Okay, okay, the Qatsi movies aren't really conspiracy flicks. But it seems to me that conspiracy nuts and doomsayers (full disclosure: I'm a bit of a doomsayer myself) have a few things in common. Also, watching the Qatsi movies feels, at times, like a secret, underground education. Like having your eyes opened by Morpheus in The Matrix. Or could it be that the Qatsi trilogy is a tool of the Illuminati?! (gasps)
But seriously: what gives Reggio's Qatsi trilogy its strength is its systemic long-view of human techno-conquest. These aren't conspiracy rants, but rather they constitute a free form analysis of what you might call the human technological instinct. Our seemingly innate drive to modify the environment and create tools and our capacity for pattern seeking, systemic methods of thought has led us to great scientific breakthroughs, grand works of art, engineering, and architecture, and advances in medicine which have improved the quality of our lives on this planet.
But our capacity for systemic thought and quantitative scientific endeavor has also created the atom bomb, industrial pollution, vast inequalities of wealth and healthcare, mass slaughter via wars and genocides, and the potential for the creation of new super-viruses and bacteria via the uncontrolled use of antibiotics and designer pathogens. There's no way we can live without technology at this point, and yet it seems to be impossible to control. Reggio's Qatsi movies don't offer up any easy solutions or heroes. They are portraits of the world as it is in all its complexity. Naqoyqatsi seems to be a vision of the near future. So maybe Naqoyqatsi is a little bit more of a cautionary tale than the other two. With this third Qatsi movie, there's more of a sense that the future it depicts hasn't quite happened yet, that maybe we can take another path.
The closing images of Naqoyqatsi are redolent with a dark kind of hope: footage of human skydivers who seem to defy gravity, who seem to fly. Could these flying people be the fruit of some sort of transhumanist selective breeding program? Could all the conflict and strife and mass slaughter be bending towards the production of a new, superior form of humanity, suited to existing beyond the confines of the earth?
Or is it another fevered delusion born of human arrogance and cruelty? After all, skydivers only look like they're flying. They're actually plummeting at great speed towards the dirt.
Maybe these final images are meant to suggest our own towering delusions as a species, our collective fantasies of conquest, empowerment, of techno-immortality . . . These final images also seem to echo the falling rocket debris from the end of Koyaanisqatsi.
Maybe, with this third and final Qatsi movie, we are at the end of the human dream of absolute power over nature. For that matter, maybe we have also reached the end of our collective fantasy that technology serves us as a tool, and we must now wake up to the fact that we are carried along by the techno-instinct as much as or even more than we have any control over it. Maybe we can't change our fate as a species, but at least we have some idea of what's coming. The first two Qatsi movies were trailers for the world as it once was in the time that those movies were made, preparing their audiences for contact with stark reality. Naqoyqatsi is a trailer for a merciless future that we cannot resist or change. Here's hoping Godfrey Reggio didn't get it all right . . .
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
MOVIE REVIEW: POWAQQATSI: LIFE IN TRANSFORMATION (1988)
Directed by Godfrey Reggio
Cinematography by Graham Berry, Leonidas Zourdoumis
Music by Philip Glass
Written by Godfrey Reggio, Ken Richards
Film Editing by Iris Cahn, Miroslav Janek, Alton Walpole
Executive Producers Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus
Cinematography by Graham Berry, Leonidas Zourdoumis
Music by Philip Glass
Written by Godfrey Reggio, Ken Richards
Film Editing by Iris Cahn, Miroslav Janek, Alton Walpole
Executive Producers Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus
Review by William D. Tucker.
Powaqqatsi is the thematic and stylistic sequel to Koyaanisqatsi. Both are documentaries without any sort of conventional narration, whether voice over or subtitles or inter-titles, dialogue, interviews, charts, graphs, quantitative statistical data, and both are bereft of any sort of obvious advocacy or messaging. Rather, there is Philip Glass's ominously sublime music which gives a kind of otherworldly voice to the imagery, combined with some sound effects, and the montage effect of joining footage shot in locations around the world. Glass's score is kind of like the script, and the overall montage effect of each movie is a kind of magic which unites humans all over the globe into a grand mythic narrative. Watching these movies is like watching an attempt to convey a global narrative of technology's impact on human civilizations and cultures from the point of view of a divine or semi-divine voyeuristic entity. Or maybe that point-of-view entity is some sort of nascent global consciousness struggling to be born from the sum total of human intelligence, memory, and fantasy, combined with and amplified by a burgeoning worldwide computer network that is, itself, evolving towards some kind of sentience. Koyaanisqatsi offered a strong thematic through-line of technology's displacement of nature, almost Luddite in its suspicion of the sinister grandeur of high-tech human societies. Powaqqatsi is more subtle. The suspicion and skepticism of technology's impact and hunger for resources is still present, but this time it is the human cost which is foregrounded. The shining skyscrapers, mass production factory lines, integrated circuit cities, and weapons of mass destruction which were foregrounded in Koyaanisqatsi are relegated to the background, glimpsed askance, known by their signs and sigils, and the human wreckage their existence necessitates. Powaqqatsi is not quite the headlong plunge of Koyaanisqatsi, but it does offer an unforgettable series of meditations on human beings in action, struggling to survive in a hostile world, with only their muscles, lungs, hands, feet, hearts, and minds to keep them alive against the automated giants stalking the planet.
It's difficult to really describe, objectively, what goes on in Powaqqatsi, since it is not an objective or linear narrative experience. The movie is constructed in a way that confounds the usual flow of time, and collapses spatial distances into simultaneous moments. Human beings from different hemispheres, time frames, cultures, and languages are united via the magic of montage and music. The technological deities, idols, and mausoleums of Koyaanisqatsi are here fractionally manifested as bursts of malevolent flame; dreamy neon lights; schizoid media collages merging Me Generation fantasies of beauty, armored militarism, and delusions of unlimited knowledge and power flowing from telescreens and computer monitors into fashionable new narratives; and the ruins of bombed-out apartment blocs where homeless children squat and starve.
Powaqqatsi focuses on human bodies in motion, struggling en masse to carry sacks full of mud out of some pit, or moving in vast crowds through city streets and open air marketplaces. Humans are shown using knives and other blades to cut fruit and harvest grain. Humans use their legs to walk, or to pedal bikes, or to operate the gas and brake pedals of automobiles. Humans are seen uniting to push a malfunctioning flatbed truck over muddy ground. Humans dance as part of ecstatic religious rituals, or as part of funereal rites, or just for fun. Humans ritually battle each other with sticks in stylized poses, and this is, I suppose, a relief from the mass destruction of missiles, bombs, and napalm from the previous film. Humans of various faiths, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, and others are seen praying as individuals, and in communities. Human children stare into the camera as it pans across their faces, many of them hardly able to keep from smiling and laughing, while others look bone-tired, old before their time. And elderly humans also stare into the camera, some looking distraught, bearing the pain of a lifetime, while others seem out of their minds, distant, and still others look pleased as can be, no longer afraid, no longer full of any kind of desire or acquisitiveness.
There is one little boy who puts up his fists, though, and I can't say if he's just playing, or if he is instinctively sensing the presence of the Enemy: an exploitative, technocratic, corporate predator state looking to suck his village, his country, dry, and cast it aside. Stay tough, kid.
Human power to produce agriculture and low-tech and no-tech civilization and culture is gradually sapped by and superseded by super industrial technology. Human cultures without access to high technology become virtual slave labor for power interests from distant lands, or they are simply left in the dust. Many people are in no position to even fully comprehend the seismic changes that technology works upon humanity, although this is not always the case. Other cultures work hard to adapt, and there is the image of a young child enraptured by the neon lights of Hong Kong staring out the rear window of a moving car.
Some of the images which appear late in the movie involve collages of people moving en masse through electronically regulated crosswalks combined with poor mothers and children sitting with no possessions upon concrete. Visually, it comes across as a family abandoned by high-tech society, lost in a spectral sea of marching legs. Some families are left behind as the rest of the world marches on to an unknowable future. There is something mournful about all this, and it is hard not to sense some anger and frustration, as well. Many beautiful things are made possible with technology, including the Qatsi movies. And yet there is a momentum to high-tech change which is ruthless and must be examined, even if the damage has already been done. Powaqqatsi is, in some sense, a kind of memorial to lives lost in the process of transformation, as one kind of civilization supplants another, a new kind of Nature supplants the old one, and begins to take on a kind of life of its own.
Powaqqatsi is the thematic and stylistic sequel to Koyaanisqatsi. Both are documentaries without any sort of conventional narration, whether voice over or subtitles or inter-titles, dialogue, interviews, charts, graphs, quantitative statistical data, and both are bereft of any sort of obvious advocacy or messaging. Rather, there is Philip Glass's ominously sublime music which gives a kind of otherworldly voice to the imagery, combined with some sound effects, and the montage effect of joining footage shot in locations around the world. Glass's score is kind of like the script, and the overall montage effect of each movie is a kind of magic which unites humans all over the globe into a grand mythic narrative. Watching these movies is like watching an attempt to convey a global narrative of technology's impact on human civilizations and cultures from the point of view of a divine or semi-divine voyeuristic entity. Or maybe that point-of-view entity is some sort of nascent global consciousness struggling to be born from the sum total of human intelligence, memory, and fantasy, combined with and amplified by a burgeoning worldwide computer network that is, itself, evolving towards some kind of sentience. Koyaanisqatsi offered a strong thematic through-line of technology's displacement of nature, almost Luddite in its suspicion of the sinister grandeur of high-tech human societies. Powaqqatsi is more subtle. The suspicion and skepticism of technology's impact and hunger for resources is still present, but this time it is the human cost which is foregrounded. The shining skyscrapers, mass production factory lines, integrated circuit cities, and weapons of mass destruction which were foregrounded in Koyaanisqatsi are relegated to the background, glimpsed askance, known by their signs and sigils, and the human wreckage their existence necessitates. Powaqqatsi is not quite the headlong plunge of Koyaanisqatsi, but it does offer an unforgettable series of meditations on human beings in action, struggling to survive in a hostile world, with only their muscles, lungs, hands, feet, hearts, and minds to keep them alive against the automated giants stalking the planet.
It's difficult to really describe, objectively, what goes on in Powaqqatsi, since it is not an objective or linear narrative experience. The movie is constructed in a way that confounds the usual flow of time, and collapses spatial distances into simultaneous moments. Human beings from different hemispheres, time frames, cultures, and languages are united via the magic of montage and music. The technological deities, idols, and mausoleums of Koyaanisqatsi are here fractionally manifested as bursts of malevolent flame; dreamy neon lights; schizoid media collages merging Me Generation fantasies of beauty, armored militarism, and delusions of unlimited knowledge and power flowing from telescreens and computer monitors into fashionable new narratives; and the ruins of bombed-out apartment blocs where homeless children squat and starve.
Powaqqatsi focuses on human bodies in motion, struggling en masse to carry sacks full of mud out of some pit, or moving in vast crowds through city streets and open air marketplaces. Humans are shown using knives and other blades to cut fruit and harvest grain. Humans use their legs to walk, or to pedal bikes, or to operate the gas and brake pedals of automobiles. Humans are seen uniting to push a malfunctioning flatbed truck over muddy ground. Humans dance as part of ecstatic religious rituals, or as part of funereal rites, or just for fun. Humans ritually battle each other with sticks in stylized poses, and this is, I suppose, a relief from the mass destruction of missiles, bombs, and napalm from the previous film. Humans of various faiths, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, and others are seen praying as individuals, and in communities. Human children stare into the camera as it pans across their faces, many of them hardly able to keep from smiling and laughing, while others look bone-tired, old before their time. And elderly humans also stare into the camera, some looking distraught, bearing the pain of a lifetime, while others seem out of their minds, distant, and still others look pleased as can be, no longer afraid, no longer full of any kind of desire or acquisitiveness.
There is one little boy who puts up his fists, though, and I can't say if he's just playing, or if he is instinctively sensing the presence of the Enemy: an exploitative, technocratic, corporate predator state looking to suck his village, his country, dry, and cast it aside. Stay tough, kid.
Human power to produce agriculture and low-tech and no-tech civilization and culture is gradually sapped by and superseded by super industrial technology. Human cultures without access to high technology become virtual slave labor for power interests from distant lands, or they are simply left in the dust. Many people are in no position to even fully comprehend the seismic changes that technology works upon humanity, although this is not always the case. Other cultures work hard to adapt, and there is the image of a young child enraptured by the neon lights of Hong Kong staring out the rear window of a moving car.
Some of the images which appear late in the movie involve collages of people moving en masse through electronically regulated crosswalks combined with poor mothers and children sitting with no possessions upon concrete. Visually, it comes across as a family abandoned by high-tech society, lost in a spectral sea of marching legs. Some families are left behind as the rest of the world marches on to an unknowable future. There is something mournful about all this, and it is hard not to sense some anger and frustration, as well. Many beautiful things are made possible with technology, including the Qatsi movies. And yet there is a momentum to high-tech change which is ruthless and must be examined, even if the damage has already been done. Powaqqatsi is, in some sense, a kind of memorial to lives lost in the process of transformation, as one kind of civilization supplants another, a new kind of Nature supplants the old one, and begins to take on a kind of life of its own.
MOVIE REVIEW: KOYAANISQATSI: LIFE OUT OF BALANCE (1982)
Directed and Produced by Godfrey Reggio
Music by Philip Glass
Musical Director/Additional Music Composed by Michael Hoenig
Cinematography by Ron Fricke
Editing by Alton Walpole and Ron Fricke
Written by Godfrey Reggio, Ron Fricke, Michael Hoenig, Alton Walpole
Associate Producers Francis Ford Coppola, Mel Lawrence, Roger McNew, T. Michael Powers, Lawrence Taub, Alton Walpole
Music by Philip Glass
Musical Director/Additional Music Composed by Michael Hoenig
Cinematography by Ron Fricke
Editing by Alton Walpole and Ron Fricke
Written by Godfrey Reggio, Ron Fricke, Michael Hoenig, Alton Walpole
Associate Producers Francis Ford Coppola, Mel Lawrence, Roger McNew, T. Michael Powers, Lawrence Taub, Alton Walpole
Review by William D. Tucker.
Koyaanisqatsi is a documentary that offers only beautiful music and stunning imagery to communicate a complex view of nature and technology engaging in a grand and terrifying dialectic. Nature is violently displaced by human machines of war, resource extraction, mass production, and mass housing. One is left with the impression, initially, of the earth being punished, subverted, and subdued. But something more subtle and pervasive is going on here, something like a usurpation of nature, but always keep in mind that humans and their productions evolved out of nature. What we are seeing here is the creation of a new kind of nature, one that is based in technology rather than biology. Or maybe it's a mixture of technology and biology. Maybe technology, in this instance, is just "biology by other means."
No venerable expert talking heads, no portentous voice overs, no editorial cartoons, and a minimum of on-screen text. Watching this movie, one will not walk away with a sense that one should vote for a particular politician or convert to a specific ideology or religion, although there are passages of it which flirt with being Luddite, which comes, I think, from a profound skepticism of the Utopian dreams and cynical schemes which seem to be so intertwined with high-technological societies. There is also an awareness of the exorbitant cost that high tech First World societies extract from the developing world, where many people live in crushing poverty, and do not necessarily understand what the overall aims and goals of the invasive First World fully entail. And, perhaps, maybe the First World technocrats don't really understand what drives them on, either. Technological progress has an eerie way of erasing what has gone before, and those of us who have grown up in such societies have no memory of what things were like before the advent of globalization, TV, the internet, etc. Koyaanisqatsi seems to suggest that technology is merging with nature to produce a third thing that is somehow both more and less than either thing alone. More, in that some benefit greatly from the new synthesis; less, in that many will suffer and lose their lives and livelihoods to bring about that new synthesis. The movie offers no easy morals or advice. It is more of a portrait of things as they are, reality itself, in all its cruelty and grandeur. If there is a message here, maybe it's something like, "Brace yourself!" or "Ready or not, here it comes! It's already here!"
Koyaanisqatsi's method is pure montage, perfectly synchronized with Philip Glass's alternately majestic and mechanistic music score. Glass's music provides a kind of "machine soul" to many of the terrifying apparatus on display, and then there are other times when the score seems to be invoking a "soul of desolation" to give voice to the massive waste and folly of humanity's violence towards the environment. This is a spiritual movie, but not a dogmatic one. It is spiritual in that it seeks to create new spirits through music, images, and montage that gives voices to the inanimate things which surround us, and to some extent dictate our lives. Glass and director Godfrey Reggio do not hide their terror and skepticism at the new techno-behemoth stalking the planet, and offer up a kind of requiem in picture and sound for the old world now gone.
There are no leading characters in the usual sense, just stunning footage of natural landscapes in the opening sequences, which eventually gives way to mining operations, engineered floods, dams, and terrifying displays of atom bombs, Soviet tanks, and American fighter craft. These displays of destructive power give way to haunting footage of abandoned apartment buildings, desolate housing projects, shining skyscrapers which look eerily like science fictional mausoleums erected no doubt by the Eloi, and then picks up again with a majestic, and darkly comedic sequence which depicts the integration of frenetic human social and mass production activity into something like a worldaround computer circuit. I suspect the Wachowskis must've had this movie in mind when they made The Matrix some years later. Humanity is clearly depicted as being at war with nature.
But are we destroying the planet, or are we just making it over in our own image? Koyaanisqatsi itself is a product of high technology, a movie, whose purpose seems to be to give the audience a global perspective in such a way that would've been hard to come by in 1983, the year of its original release. No World Wide Web, no Google Earth, no capacity for billions of people around the globe to produce high volumes of televisual content for their own amusement via YouTube, just a darkened theatre to create just the right kind of worshipful mood to pay homage to the glowing screen. Well, all right, I guess there were books and nature programs on TV back in 1983, but I couldn't help but think that Koyaanisqatsi must've been a qualitatively different viewing experience for its first audiences.
All throughout the movie there are images of humans wandering the streets of large cities, herded along by WALK/DON'T WALK signs, and occasionally stopping to stare into the camera. Everyone looks lost. There's a shot of a man alone in some kind of automated facility, tending machines which don't need tending. I can't quite say why, but I want to say that this man isn't lost. He has found his place. Good for him . . . this is definitely one of those movies that invites you to create your own narratives, intimate and grand, as it carries you along to its stunning finale.
The opening sequence begins with the launch of a magnificent rocket of some kind, taking off, I guess, for outer space. There is a rather cruel payoff to this opening scene, at the very end, which gives the movie an effective shape, lends it a quality of myth, of legend. I'm thinking of Icarus here.
But there is also an inquiry into the nature of physical production, of engineering and construction projects on a vast scale. It must be said that dams, tanks, fighter jets, nuclear bombs, and large scale strip-mining operations involve vast numbers of people, and large quantities of equipment, guided by hard quantitative skills involving advanced mathematics, engineering, physics, management, and a lot of other things above my head. If Koyaanisqatsi has within it deep skepticism at our aborning high-tech civilization, then it is also about a system, a beast, which is both inspiring and terrifying to behold.
Koyaanisqatsi is a documentary that offers only beautiful music and stunning imagery to communicate a complex view of nature and technology engaging in a grand and terrifying dialectic. Nature is violently displaced by human machines of war, resource extraction, mass production, and mass housing. One is left with the impression, initially, of the earth being punished, subverted, and subdued. But something more subtle and pervasive is going on here, something like a usurpation of nature, but always keep in mind that humans and their productions evolved out of nature. What we are seeing here is the creation of a new kind of nature, one that is based in technology rather than biology. Or maybe it's a mixture of technology and biology. Maybe technology, in this instance, is just "biology by other means."
No venerable expert talking heads, no portentous voice overs, no editorial cartoons, and a minimum of on-screen text. Watching this movie, one will not walk away with a sense that one should vote for a particular politician or convert to a specific ideology or religion, although there are passages of it which flirt with being Luddite, which comes, I think, from a profound skepticism of the Utopian dreams and cynical schemes which seem to be so intertwined with high-technological societies. There is also an awareness of the exorbitant cost that high tech First World societies extract from the developing world, where many people live in crushing poverty, and do not necessarily understand what the overall aims and goals of the invasive First World fully entail. And, perhaps, maybe the First World technocrats don't really understand what drives them on, either. Technological progress has an eerie way of erasing what has gone before, and those of us who have grown up in such societies have no memory of what things were like before the advent of globalization, TV, the internet, etc. Koyaanisqatsi seems to suggest that technology is merging with nature to produce a third thing that is somehow both more and less than either thing alone. More, in that some benefit greatly from the new synthesis; less, in that many will suffer and lose their lives and livelihoods to bring about that new synthesis. The movie offers no easy morals or advice. It is more of a portrait of things as they are, reality itself, in all its cruelty and grandeur. If there is a message here, maybe it's something like, "Brace yourself!" or "Ready or not, here it comes! It's already here!"
Koyaanisqatsi's method is pure montage, perfectly synchronized with Philip Glass's alternately majestic and mechanistic music score. Glass's music provides a kind of "machine soul" to many of the terrifying apparatus on display, and then there are other times when the score seems to be invoking a "soul of desolation" to give voice to the massive waste and folly of humanity's violence towards the environment. This is a spiritual movie, but not a dogmatic one. It is spiritual in that it seeks to create new spirits through music, images, and montage that gives voices to the inanimate things which surround us, and to some extent dictate our lives. Glass and director Godfrey Reggio do not hide their terror and skepticism at the new techno-behemoth stalking the planet, and offer up a kind of requiem in picture and sound for the old world now gone.
There are no leading characters in the usual sense, just stunning footage of natural landscapes in the opening sequences, which eventually gives way to mining operations, engineered floods, dams, and terrifying displays of atom bombs, Soviet tanks, and American fighter craft. These displays of destructive power give way to haunting footage of abandoned apartment buildings, desolate housing projects, shining skyscrapers which look eerily like science fictional mausoleums erected no doubt by the Eloi, and then picks up again with a majestic, and darkly comedic sequence which depicts the integration of frenetic human social and mass production activity into something like a worldaround computer circuit. I suspect the Wachowskis must've had this movie in mind when they made The Matrix some years later. Humanity is clearly depicted as being at war with nature.
But are we destroying the planet, or are we just making it over in our own image? Koyaanisqatsi itself is a product of high technology, a movie, whose purpose seems to be to give the audience a global perspective in such a way that would've been hard to come by in 1983, the year of its original release. No World Wide Web, no Google Earth, no capacity for billions of people around the globe to produce high volumes of televisual content for their own amusement via YouTube, just a darkened theatre to create just the right kind of worshipful mood to pay homage to the glowing screen. Well, all right, I guess there were books and nature programs on TV back in 1983, but I couldn't help but think that Koyaanisqatsi must've been a qualitatively different viewing experience for its first audiences.
All throughout the movie there are images of humans wandering the streets of large cities, herded along by WALK/DON'T WALK signs, and occasionally stopping to stare into the camera. Everyone looks lost. There's a shot of a man alone in some kind of automated facility, tending machines which don't need tending. I can't quite say why, but I want to say that this man isn't lost. He has found his place. Good for him . . . this is definitely one of those movies that invites you to create your own narratives, intimate and grand, as it carries you along to its stunning finale.
The opening sequence begins with the launch of a magnificent rocket of some kind, taking off, I guess, for outer space. There is a rather cruel payoff to this opening scene, at the very end, which gives the movie an effective shape, lends it a quality of myth, of legend. I'm thinking of Icarus here.
But there is also an inquiry into the nature of physical production, of engineering and construction projects on a vast scale. It must be said that dams, tanks, fighter jets, nuclear bombs, and large scale strip-mining operations involve vast numbers of people, and large quantities of equipment, guided by hard quantitative skills involving advanced mathematics, engineering, physics, management, and a lot of other things above my head. If Koyaanisqatsi has within it deep skepticism at our aborning high-tech civilization, then it is also about a system, a beast, which is both inspiring and terrifying to behold.
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