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Koyaanisqatsi / Powaqqatsi (2 Pack)
List Price: $409.06 Our Price: $306.80
DVD - 17 September, 2002
MGM/UA Video
Unrated
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Director: Godfrey Reggio
Number of Media: 2
Features: - Color
- Closed-captioned
- Widescreen
- Dolby
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| DVD Description Koyaanisqatsi
First-time filmmaker Godfrey Reggio's experimental documentary from 1983--shot mostly in the desert Southwest and New York City on a tiny budget with no script, then attracting the support of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas and enlisting the indispensable musical contribution of Philip Glass--delighted college students on the midnight circuit and fans of minimalism for many years. Meanwhile, its techniques, merging cinematographer Ron Fricke's time-lapse shots (alternately peripatetic and hyperspeed) with Glass's reiterative music (from the meditative to the orgiastic)--as well as its ecology-minded imagery--crept into the consciousness of popular culture. The influence of Koyaanisqatsi, or "life out of balance," has by now become unmistakable in television advertisements, music videos, and, of course, similar movies such as Fricke's own Chronos and Craig McCourry's Apogee. Reggio shot a sequel, Powaqqatsi (1988), and completed the trilogy with Naqoyqatsi (2002). Koyaanisqatsi provides the uninitiated the chance to see where it all started--along with an intense audiovisual rush. Powaqqatsi
Powaqqatsi (1988), or "life in transformation," is the second part of a trilogy of experimental documentaries whose titles derive from Hopi compound nouns. The now legendary Koyaanisqatsi (1983), or "life out of balance," was the first. Naqoyqatsi (2002), or "life in war," was the third. Powaqqatsi finds director Godfrey Reggio somewhat more directly polemical than before, and his major collaborator, the composer Philip Glass, stretching to embrace world music. Reggio reuses techniques familiar from the previous film (slow motion, time-lapse, superposition) to dramatize the effects of the so-called First World on the Third: displacement, pollution, alienation. But he spends as much time beautifully depicting what various cultures have lost--cooperative living, a sense of joy in labor, and religious values--as he does confronting viewers with trains, airliners, coal cars, and loneliness. What had been a more or less peaceful, slow-moving, spiritually fulfilling rural existence for these "silent" people (all we hear is music and sound effects) becomes a crowded, suffocating, accelerating industrial urban hell, from Peru to Pakistan. Reggio frames Powaqqatsi with a telling image: the Serra Pelada gold mines, where thousands of men, their clothes and skin imbued with the earth they're moving, carry wet bags up steep slopes in a Sisyphean effort to provide wealth for their employers. While Glass juxtaposes his strangely joyful music, which includes the voices of South American children, a number of these men carry one of their exhausted comrades out of the pit, his head back and arms outstretched--one more sacrifice to Caesar. Nevertheless, Reggio, a former member of the Christian Brothers, seems to maintain hope for renewal. --Robert Burns Neveldine |
| Reviews from Customers
I will buy my first DVD player specifically for these films! Enough has been said in the other reviews about the awesome, mystical, life-changing, meditative, and sublime power of these two movies. Now that the third film NAQOYQATSI is going to be in theaters this fall, the first two will finally be in general release on DVD. I saw both in their first release and with Philip Glass live... the DVDs will undoubtedly be worth the wait, so I am reserving my copies now! Oh, did I mention I don't have a DVD player yet? I have been holding out... but *THIS* is as good a reason to buy one as I've ever had! If the transfer is done right (it should be, given the wait!) both the picture and the sound will be incredible... hmmm I may need a bigger TV screen too :-) I assume most of those who will buy the DVDs are already aficionados of these films. For those who haven't seen them, let me just say you have to make both time for uninterrupted viewing and space in your mind to let the images and sound flow. They are most definitely *not* your typical "snacking and chattering" films.
Release It Those who have viewed koyaanisqatsi several times know what a beauty of a film it is. The cinematography coupled with the sometimes haunting and sometimes rapid music of Phillip Glass gives the viewer an almost hypnotic experience. Time lapse fast and time lapse slow are blended together as they tell the visual story of nature and man, life out of balance. The film climaxs with "The Grid", a high speed acceleration of people, autos, an unbelievably well written and performed music score, and a road scene that would rival Steve Mcqueen's chase scene in "Bulitt". The mood changes throughout the movie and the experience is spellbinding. I hope this movie will be released on DVD soon. John Mark
A Masterpiece The only shortcoming of the masterpiece epic "Koyaanisqatsi" on DVD is technical: the tape-to-DVD transfer is quite noisy: it's evident in some shots and colors where the shimmering "noise" detracts slightly from the visuals. Nevertheless this is a groundbreaking film, and seeing it 21 years after its cinematic release, yah it blows me (and anyone else who sees it)away. So hey GR howzaboot a complete remastering, on par with the excellent soundtrack remaster? This film deserves nothing less. One of the top 5 films of all time. |
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