Koyaanisqatsi - DVD Review

MOVIE
VIDEO
AUDIO
EXTRAS
OVERALL

One Disc
1.85:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
Spanish & French Subtitles
Original Theatrical Trailers
Documentary
Run Time: 87 Minutes
Keep Case

MOVIE
Rated G though contains VERY brief nudity

I'm a huge fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I instantly identified with the show due to my already annoying to my family habit of making fun of movies I didn't like. I've never been allowed to forget the viewing of The Santa Clause with the family that I mocked throughout. My love of the series came to a fever pitch in 1997. At the same time, I was in a creative writing class taught by my all time favorite teacher Kevin Brewner. He was desperately trying to teach a class full of seniors to expand their views of storytelling introducing me successfully in class to the music of Ray Lynch. He was slightly less successful in introducing me and the class to the film Koyaanisqatsi. While Ray Lynch's strange and fluid music instantly inspired me, Koyaanisqatsi bored me, and unleashed the inner heckler. I spent most of the viewing experience mocking the film, pointing out all the possible phallic images and otherwise making an ass of myself. Now, the film runs eighty-seven minutes long, and class was only fifty minutes, so we saw under half of the film that first day and I was absent due to a brute deciding to flatten my nose. So Brewner, in his infinite wisdom handed me his personal copy of the film and demanded that I sit, alone in my room and watch it from beginning to end, no interruptions, the lights out, etc. So I did. And then I rewound the film and watched it again. (Something I'd only done once before with The Breakfast Club.) And suddenly it all made sense to me. It was almost as if the entire world had snapped into focus. The underlying themes in the film that were literally up to my own imagination, the glorious score by Phillip Glass, who I knew at that point from his score for Candyman, one of my favorite horror films, and the stunning photography by Ron Fricke.
So what in the hell is Koyaanisqatsi? Well, it's rather hard to explain. It's along the same lines as Pink Floyd: The Wall, though it doesn’t give you the same type of map to a solution, it doesn’t find the answers for you. You need to dig and dig and eventually, you’ll come up with them yourself. The title loosely has several definitions at the end of the film. Ko-yaa-nis-qatsi (from the Hopi language), n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living. That last one is my personal favorite. And that title card, shown at the end of the film, gives you the only bit of a roadmap youre going to get, although some of the visual transitions help. So, again, what is it. Koyaanisqatsi is the first part of a trilogy of films relying only on images and music to tell their stories. This is what Brewner was so big on, we were all worried about having too few characters and too little dialogue and how would we tell our stories then. Here was a film with absolutely no characters or dialogue and it still manages to tell a pretty damned good story. As with the next too parts in the trilogy, Powaqqatsi (released on DVD with Koyaanisqatsi) and Naqoyqatsi (to be released in theaters October 18th, 2002) director/creator Godfrey Reggio, a former monk teamed with musician Philip Glass to create an all encompassing experience that would make people look again at the world they live in.
Koyaanisqatsi takes its aim at technology and how our use of technology is slowly destroying the natural world. One need only look at two images in the film to see that, the above image of the people on the beach in the shade of an industrial monstrosity and the visions of the desert with power lines crowding through it. He makes a good argument, right down to his comparison of our cities viewed from space to a microchip, and the Los Angeles freeways (which I got to experience live and in person this past Summer) sending big cars (it was shot in the late seventies/early eighties) along spewing dirt into the air. Some of the points he makes I don't agree with. I don't agree that our mass production of cars is anything like our mass production of tanks in wars. Of course, maybe he's not trying to make that point, maybe that's just something I'm taking away from the film, revealing a little bit more about myself.
If nothing else, the music is stunning and the visuals are like a roadmap of the country, showing us the peaks and valleys and deserts and plains of this great land of ours. It's a visually sumptuous feast and one well worth sitting down for. The music itself gets inside your head, even if the minimalist stylings of Philip Glass aren't quite your bag. Bottom line is DON'T BE LIKE ME! Give yourself over to the film. It's only 87 minutes, without credits you're down to around an even hour and twenty minutes. C'mon, you can spare that much. You may be pleasantly surprised.

VIDEO QUALITY
Okay, there's been some debate about this. Some have argued that Koyaanisqatsi was shot in 1.33:1 full frame and should be presented that way, as was the premium DVD offered through IFE films with a donation of $180 a few years ago. Others say that, while it may have been shot in 1.33:1, it was projected in 1.85:1, the ratio it is presented in on this new MGM DVD. After comparing my video copy to this new DVD, I did notice that, yes the picture was cropped on the top and bottom, matted to 1.85:1. This is common enough after all. The fact that the MGM release has this ratio, though, leads me to believe that this was the intended ratio, the one that Ron Fricke and Godfrey Reggio wanted in the first place, after all they were involved with the DVD creation. With that in mind, then, the picture has been greatly cleaned up from previous releases, specifically the long out of print video edition and looks great. However, some shots will never get cleaned up due to the fact that some footage in the film is stock footage and just looks horrible as it is. Considering its age, and the fact that, as an art film, it hasn't had the proper consideration for nearly the past twenty years, I think it looks fantastic.

AUDIO QUALITY
Philip Glass's phenomenal score, and the minimal audio effects are well mixed into all five channels in the Dolby Digital 5.1 score accompanying this film. I bought, not too long ago, the rerecording of the Koyaanisqatsi score, which was also mixed in Dolby Digital 5.1. While this rerecording sounded great, it was obviously a different version than the original, the vocals were different as were some of the chord progressions. Therefore, I was thrilled to find that the audio on this DVD version was actually a 5.1 remix of the original score. The mix is full and rich, wonderfully vibrant and worth playing over and over, even in the background.

EXTRAS
An all-new documentary is included on the disc and runs about twenty-four minutes. The doc consists of footage from the film along with interviews with Reggio and Glass. Both come across as academics and obviously have put a lot of thought into the film over the past twenty years. Given the interesting insights into the production of the film and the way these two came together in the first place, one wishes for a full-length audio commentary on the DVD. Unfortunately, this great documentary is rather short. The other extra on the disc is three original theatrical trailers, one for each film in the trilogy. All three trailers are interesting, but the best of the bunch is Naqoyqatsi's. A nice addition.

CLOSING THOUGHTS
I've seen this film countless times since that first viewing back in 1997 and each time I find it an invigorating and worthwhile experience, offering new insights into the depths of the film. I never tire of the film, and now that I have it in a digital medium as opposed to my steadily wearing out VHS copy, I'm completely content. Fabulous.