Koyaanisqatsi

Though Koyaanisqatsi has an overtly prophetic air—several apocryphal Hopi prophecies are chanted to Phillip Glass' infamous score—the film's value or novelty does not lie in its eschatology or its "life is out of balance" thesis. Rather, like its contemporary Akira, Koyaanisqatsi's novelty lies in its capturing of a freakishly balanced mechanized life—an artificial life symbiotically tied to a disciplinary order that has come to mimic or subsume the chaos of nature itself. The "films have never been about the effect of technology, of industry on people." as Director Godfrey Reggio said in Essence of Life. "It's been that everyone: politics, education, things of the financial structure, the nation state structure, language, the culture, religion, all of that exists within the host of technology. So it's not the effect of, it's that everything exists within [technology]. It's not that we use technology, we live technology..."

On this basis, it is our ever-developing techno-lifeworld that the Qatsi trilogy schematically fleshes out. The films' juxtapositions of man and nature, time-lapsed peoplescapes and cloudscapes, capture not a move away from an imagined balance, but instead both worlds' capillaries and circuitries, complex breathing machines and living machines, each as quirky arrhythmic as the other: streams of bodies, taxis, buses, planes and ships roar and hustle and bustle as they rhythmically fill and empty their narrows; meanwhile, a far away mountain collapses on itself with a violent eruption.

And it is there, with the violent sublime juxtapositions, perhaps, that we are led to one of the film's more subtle statements: crisis today is not so much linked to the Hopi prophecy "if we dig precious things from land, we will invite disaster," but instead more to the idea that "crisis is life," or especially in this technocratic age to "crisis is balance." Indeed, modern society's turn to nature has fostered a crisis culture in which imbalance itself is the mode of balance: allegorically speaking, every day is a restorative forest fire, hurricane, tsunami, or 'natural' correction; every successive shock (the economic crisis, science's ethical crisis, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the prospective one in Iran) is but a natural "birth-pang" as Condoleezza Rice would put it, standing apart from (or perhaps even against) the 'real-natural' seismic tragedies in Haiti, Chile, and Taiwan, and the 'real-natural' prospects of global warming and new pneumonic plague outbreaks.

In the end, therefore, one could conclude that Qatsi, in a way, paints an odd struggle: the struggle between Gaea and techno-modernity competing for sovereignty over the body, nature, and divine violence—the mangled bodies of Picasso's Guernica. And this struggle between Gaea and techno-modernity is the political-philosophical-ethical-ecological question of our late-capitalist era: the question of crisis, its alleviation, and the Natural in the space of a mechanized politics armed with neuroscience, gene therapy, and new discipline/norming-machines on the brink of establishing a new form of benign totalitarianism for legitimacy.