Chapter 5: Time-Lapse in "Koyaanisqatsi"

Certainly time-lapse's most prominent contemporary film role--at least "best supporting" if not "leading"--is in Koyaanisqatsi (1983). A wordless documentary film, sometimes described as a cinematic tone-poem, Koyaanisqatsi is the collaborative creation of Godfrey Reggio, a former Catholic monk (once a member of the Christian Brotherhood), cinematographer Ron Fricke, and minimalist composer Philip Glass. Originally Reggio's brainchild, the film was twenty years in the making and finally saw the light of day only after Francis Ford Coppola lent it his financial support. Since its release it has gone on to attain cult status and Reggio has continued work on a trilogy of documentaries about the modern world. (Koyaanisqatsi may be watched in its entirety on YouTube here.) (Watch a video about the making of the film below.)




The film's title comes from the language of the Hopi Indians of the American Southwest, perhaps the most visionary of all Native American tribes, whose ancient prophecies foresaw the coming of the United States, the creation of space stations, and the eventual death of white civilization. As we are informed at the movie's close, "Koyaanisqatsi" means:

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.

And the film is best understood as an extended description of this insanity. "According to one Hindu legend," The Romanian essayist E. M. Cioran has written, "Shiva, at a particular moment, will begin to dance, at first slowly, then faster and faster, and will not stop before having imposed upon the world a frenzied cadence, in every respect opposed to that of Creation." "This legend," Cioran notes, "includes no commentary, history having assumed the task of illustrating its obvious truth." This dance is Koyaanisqatsi's subject.

Koyaanisqatsi has been criticized as hypocritical. The film's "double vanity," as one commentator puts it, is "that it partakes of the very hysteria it decries." Another has complained that though "it may invoke the spirit of Hopi belief, . . . it's as much a contemporary artifact as a video game." Reggio has defended himself against the charge by insisting that he deliberately chose to avoid the ugly in his depiction of our "crazy life." As David Sterritt has noted, summarizing Reggio's justification, "In the Bible and elsewhere, . . . the message is plain: The most dangerous tendencies in modern life may seem to be the most seductive." The film's primary objective was thus to depict "'the beauty of the beast'"; to convince us that "what we consider our crowning jewels--our technologies and machines--may be the very things that cause all our difficulties." The oblivion of Being, after all, is itself terribly seductive.

In the "fascinating images" of the opening sequence of Koyaanisqatsi, the eye of the camera opens on an Earth without man. Although as viewers we are aware of the artifice--conscious of the helicopter in which the camera rides, of the use of slow motion and time-lapse photography, and the special filters--still the images--of clouds, caves, light, flowing water, steam, sand, and geological wonders--haunt us, we who have convinced ourselves in the modern age that the world would be devoid of all quality if it were not for man's consciousness, by their seeming lack of a human presence. They offer us the opportunity to imagine the Earth as it might have been before we emerged from it, or after we have been extinquished, or departed.



If, as Lewis Thomas's conception of the Earth as a single cell and Lovelock's "Gaia hypothesis" suggest, the Earth itself is a kind of giant organism, with its own metabolism, respiration, and atmosphere, Koyaanisqatsi's first sequence offers us a portrait of this being in all its wonders.


A geo-logic, not a human logos, governs this world. We see a river (the Colorado) meander through a chasm (the Grand Canyon) which it has itself cut. We explore a deep cave out of which birds and bats move at random. We watch the sun glisten across the waves of the ocean. We witness cloud banks mounting up in such density and turbulence that the very sky seems an ungovernable ocean. We peer down over a waterfall as it plummets to the depths below. We are present as night and day in quick succession move rapidly--captured in time-lapse photography--across the face of an immense cliff. Mesmerized, we look on as sand undulates in timeless patterning. And none of these comings and goings, toings and froings --the "sensitive chaos," as Theodore Schwenk has described it--of the being called Gaia need us in the least for their enactment; none take place in a time we would recognize as human. This is phusis we watch, not nature.

But beginning with images of explosions and then, in rapid montage, shots of an earth mover, a long pipeline, electric lines, a power station, a huge dam, an immense crane, oil rigs, a tank farm, a mushroom cloud, and, finally, women and children sunbathing in the shadow of a nuclear power plant, Koyaanisqatsi moves abruptly into the realm of the stored-away. The remainder of the film memorably portrays this new "setting to order" of things.


If Koyaanisqatsi's first sequence captures a world without man, the remainder--especially a key central sequence known on the Glass soundtrack as "The Grid"--depicts a world filled to overflowing with men and their things, a modern city world. Exploding buildings; the South Bronx in decay; immense glass skyscrapers that mirror the sky above; boulevards, malls, bowling alleys overrun with human beings; impossible intersections, criss-crossed by thousands and thousands of cars and people choreographed by some invisible hand; interlocking freeways which, shot from above and in time-lapse photography, appear to be some kind of circulatory system for the city; human beings by the thousands crossing Grand Central Station and entering and exiting escalators with the determination of ants, and hot dogs, automobiles, TVs, computers, jeans, and Twinkies in counter-pointed, match-cut mass production. The world of Koyaanisqatsi is clearly one in which "all that is solid melts into air."



Near the end of Koyaanisqatsi, as a transition to its last somber sequence, we find ourselves, after a jump cut, looking down upon a city from above. Experienced air travelers immediately recognize the image. In another cut, the camera moves to an even higher altitude, and it takes the viewer but a moment to discern exactly what he or she is seeing. The world of urban sprawl, eight-lane highways, grid-lock, and skyscrapers to which the early scenes had so accustomed us becomes momentarily disorienting, seen from this high perspective, but some recognizable forms are still apparent: highways, bodies of water, parks, stadia. But then, in fairly rapid montage (a total of over a dozen shots), this extreme aerial long shot view is match-cut with extreme close-ups of what appear to be computer circuit boards and the intricate weave of Hopi Indian blankets.


This montage brings to a culmination a theme that has run throughout. For much of the film, we have looked down upon the world. In the early natural scenes, such a point of view had expanded our vision of the immensity of the world, of its geological and meteorological sweep. But in these aerial views of cityscapes, the effect is to offer us an Archimedean perspective on human affairs, a perspective which, as Arendt foresaw, actually belittles human achievement. For as Arendt writes in "The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,"

If we look down from this point [of Einstein's "observer freely poised in space"] at what is going on Earth and upon the various activities of men, that is, if we apply the Archimedean point to ourselves, then these activities will indeed appear to ourselves as no more than "overt behavior," which we can study with the same methods we use to study the behavior of rats.

"Seen from a sufficient distance," Arendt writes, "the cars in which we travel and which we know we built ourselves . . . look as though they were, as Heisenberg once put it, 'as inescapable a part of ourselves as the snail's shell is to its occupant.'"


Consequently, Arendt insists, "the overview effect" decreases human stature: "All our pride in what we can do . . . disappears into some kind of mutation of the human race; the whole of technology, seen from this point, in fact no longer appears as the result of a conscious human effort to extend man's material power, but rather as a large-scale biological process." From such a perspective, simulation seems inevitable, seems almost to be God's will. (From such a perspective, it is possible for Freeman Dyson to hallucinate today's purely technological spacecraft transformed, less than three decades hence, into a living creature able to explore the cosmos. "It is reasonable to think of the micro-spacecraft of the year 2010," Dyson claims in his Gifford Lectures [Infinite in All Directions], "not as a structure of metal and glass and silicon, but as a living creature, fed on Earth like a caterpillar, launched into space like a chrysalis, riding a laser beam into orbit, and metamorphosing in space like a butterfly.")

Much of Koyaanisqatsi is shot from the Archimedean point. As we watch the transformation of rivers into pipelines, sheer cliffs into skyscrapers, river canyons into the valley boulevards between New York's mammoth buildings, superhighways into the circulatory system of the megalopolis, and Indian blankets become cities, become circuit boards, we recognize that we are witness to an quantum metamorphosis in the conception of human destiny enacted by the adoption of an Archimedean perspective.

But in the end the film does not sanction the Archmidean perspective. Its closing shot is of a missile launch, the same missile we had witnessed during the film's title sequence as it slowly lifted off from its pad. As it soars skyward, it explodes in mid-air, and for over two minutes we watch a large piece of its hull fall slowly, slowly back to Earth before the final credits remind us of the Hopi prophecy of White civilization's inevitable collapse.