Koyaanisqatsi / Powaqqatsi DVD

Godfrey Reggio’s musings on the state of the planet at the beginning and end
of the 1980s here get the DVD treatment, allowing you to experience the
director... Read on

Godfrey Reggio’s musings on the state of the planet at the beginning and end
of the 1980s here get the DVD treatment, allowing you to experience the
director’s frenetic imagery and Philip Glass’s surging scores with
crystal-clear picture and sound quality. You might not always agree with
some occasionally facile editorialising - or with the "come on, get hippy"
sentiment - but the films are, in their own way, unique cinematic moments,
and fairly solid proof of the movies’ status as one of the best stimulants
around.

Released in 1983, Koyaanisqatsi has a foreboding Hopi Indian title which
literally translates to "a life out of balance", but - in light of the
involvement of Francis Ford Coppola and the film’s fiery finale - could
equally play as "an apocalypse now". (One extraordinary sequence comes over
as a documentary equivalent of the Ride Of The Valkyries scene in the real
Apocalypse Now, as a helicopter swoops over a doomed U.S. housing estate,
and Glass’s score suddenly takes on violins and trumpets and gets all
Wagnerian on us.) The points Reggio makes about land exploitation are as
valid as they’ve ever been twenty years on, but the film is best viewed as a
celebration of ritual in all its forms - both spiritual and urban - and as
an at times hallucinatory conjunction of images and sound.

Follow-up Powaqqatsi, released in 1988, extends its gaze beyond America, but
remains critical of what happens when Western superpowers - not content with
screwing up their own ecology - start to meddle in the affairs of the rest
of the world. A third film in the series, Naqoyqatsi, has just been released
in the States; Reggio and the environmentalist lobby must be wondering where
all this has to stop, while presumably hoping the audience for this box set
disposes of any packaging conscientiously.

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