Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3285 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-01-13
• Rating: Universal, suitable for all
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Formats: Box set, PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 178 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi ("life out of balance") and Powaqqatsi ("life in transformation") are the first two parts of a trilogy of experimental documentaries whose titles derive from Hopi compound nouns (2002's Naqoyqatsi, or "life in war", is the third). Both feature indispensable musical contributions from minimalist composer Philip Glass.

Made in 1983, Koyaanisqatsi was shot mostly in the desert southwest USA and New York City on a tiny budget with no script. But it then attracted the support of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas and reached a much wider audience. Its techniques, merging cinematographer Ron Fricke's time-lapse shots (alternately peripatetic and hyperspeed) with Glass' 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 has by now become unmistakable in television advertisements, music videos and, of course, similar movies.

Dating from 1988, Powaqqatsi finds the director somewhat more directly polemical than before, with Glass's score stretching to embrace world music. Reggio reuses techniques familiar from the previous film (slow motion, time-lapse, superposition) to dramatise 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 labour 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

Special Features

Koyaanisqatsi:

"Essence of Life" featurette with Director and Composer

Original Theatrical Trailers

Interactive Movie Screens and Chapter Selections

Dolby Digital 5.1

1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen

Subtitles: English, German, Hungarian, French, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Greek, Dutch

Powaqqatsi:

"Impact of Progress" featurette with Director and Composer

Original Theatrical Trailers

Interactive Movie Screens and Chapter Selections

Dolby Digital 5.1

1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen

Subtitles: English, German, Hungarian, French, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Greek, Dutch

Synopsis
This collection combines the visual artisty of Godfrey Reggio's ambitious, worldless epics KOYAANISQATSI and POWAQQATSI. Both films study nature and its relationship to modern man. The scores of both films are composed and performed by Philip Glass.

Customer Reviews

Movies without words, that will keep you glued to the screen
Director Godfrey Reggio and Composer Phillip Glass collaborated on a number of "movies without words". This DVD includes "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaqqatsi". Both have a similar approach. The most legendary of the two is Koyaanisqatsi, and this disk is worth getting, just to have that movie.

Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi Indian word, one of its meanings being "Life Out of Balance". This is a little misleading, since principally what Reggio is portraying in this film is the effect of machines and technology on people, and where we fit in to it. I say "what Reggio is portraying", but that is inaccurate. It is really what Reggio _and_ Phillip Glass, the soundtrack composer, are portraying. The soundtrack through this wordless movie is continuous and is as important as the images. If you have never heard Phillip Glass' music before, it is a sort of repetitive classical music called "process" music or "minimalist". It works through repetition, hypnotic effects and dynamic build-up. It can be very very effective.

In fact in this movie the music has an almost drug-like effect. During the slower scenes of the movie, there is slower repetitive music, and I felt myself relaxing into it. But during the very fast scenes in the movie, the music is ridiculously fast, and the effect is very invigorating. I almost felt like punching the air at times!

So what exactly are these scenes? Well they are slow panning, slow-motion, fast motion, and normal motion scenes of nature, technology, people, cities, etc. If you have seen the movie "Baraka" you may know what I'm talking about (Koyaanisqatsi created a genre, of which Baraka has become a part). Using scenes of the desert, of the moon rising, of buildings being demolished, of freeway footage sped-up, and of subway stations at a blur, Reggio documents mans' integration and dependency on technology, and how it affects us. And he does this in brilliant synergy with Phillip Glass' music.

This is no "difficult" or "experimental" movie in the sense you may be thinking. It is captivating and exciting. I had a group of friends round to watch the DVD, some of whom liked art-house movies, and some of whom didn't. They were all impressed by Koyaanisqatsi.

If you want a new, exciting and engrossing experience in movies, then check out this DVD. If you just want to see some great filming, and to hear some fabulous process/minimalist music, then check out this DVD. If you want to feel that you've experienced something extraordinary and deep, and seen the world in a new light, and been given a great buzz from doing all of that, then check out this DVD.

Stop jumping up and down in joy and buy it
Kick-started by the belated release of part three, this DVD double pack (two normal DVDs in a slip case, indicating that they're going to be available separately soon if you like one but hate the other -- does such a person exist?) is the best New Year present fans of the first two parts could have received. And I'm delighted to report, these DVDs are perfection.

OK, so there aren't a great deal of extras. No scene-by-scene director's commentary, no hour length "The making of..." documentary. But those things are fluff anyway. There are the obligatory trailers and tacked-on interviews with Godfrey Reggio (director) and Philip Glass (composer) but the heart of the movies are, of course, the movies, and these are everything you could ask for. Stunning high definition widescreen transcriptions, plus both soundtracks reprocessed into dart-around-your-livingroom 5.1 surround. Unless you're already kitted out, this will be the most expensive DVD you ever purchase since you'll want the top of the range widescreen TV and home cinema setup to appreciate it in all its glory. You can also throw away your old soundtrack LPs or CDs in favour of this 5.1 version, but if you need a soundtrack at all, get the 1998 rerecording of "Koyaanisqatsi" on Nonesuch which is a) less abbreviated than the original LP b) a brand new recording so different to the one in the film c) absolutely stunning.

If you know the -Qatsi films, no further recommendation is required, and you're probably already half way through check-out. If you're new to them, they are certainly worth the gamble. Happily, they're not New Age visuals set to New Age music, don't fear, but some of the most haunting images you'll ever see set to possibly the two finest soundtracks of all time. It's not possible to put them on as wallpaper.

Here's a very brief overview. Godfrey Reggio started the project in 1978 (as he explains in the interview) as a follow-up to a film warning about government surveillance. (There's a very strong religious undertone too, but don't worry, it doesn't cloud the results.) The idea was to create a movie with no narrative, no characterisation, not even a title, though he eventually settled on "Koyannisqatsi" as being totally inscrutable and meaningless to the majority of people. (Fittingly, it's from a Native American language.) Cinematographer Ron Fricke was sent out to film America, and the footage was married to a score written for the project by Philip Glass. Throughout most of "Koyannisqatsi" the films were sped up, forming a whirl of dizzy images now familiar from countless adverts/pop videos etc which came in the film's wake -- clouds billowing, sun and moon sweeping across the sky, cars streaking on highways, lights dancing on and off in nighttime skyscrapers, ant-like people scurrying onto escalators, etc. The "plot" moves the viewer from beautiful scenes of the untouched American landscape to the modern, urban, technological wasteland -- housing estates being demolished, tramps and the homeless, urban ghettos and so on -- via production lines churning out weiners and twinkies, cars being made and cars being crushed, the rich under the glittering lights of Las Vegas and the poor in the same city's gutters -- the American dream in all its blasted glory. The idea was to show how America has lost touch with its own landscape to embrace a technological future which had ended up betraying it. Many of the images are as futuristic as anything you see in "Blade Runner", especially the nighttime grids of light which are big US cities (though the film shows its age slightly when Reggio compares these to computer circuit boards, now something of a cliche). The haunting final scene, in which a NASA rocket explodes shortly after take-off and we follow, for what seems like an eternity, the tumbling, burning wreck of the capsule as it falls back towards Earth, accompanied by Glass's mournful score, sums the entire film up succinctly.

In contrast to the sped-up whirl of "Koyannisqatsi", the second movie, "Powaqqatsi" is mainly slowed-down film, this time broadening the scope to a global travelogue detailing the lives and labours of the majority of the world's population -- poor, enslaved, but fiercely proud of themselves and their culture. The defining scene here is the lengthly pre-title sequence of dirt-caked workers staggering up a muddy slope in a South American gold mine, hauling up endless sacks of mud and the fallen bodies of their co-workers, trading their lives for the few grains of gold which will make their white masters even richer. "Powaqqatsi" suffers slightly from not having a narrative flow -- it is, essentially, a travelogue -- and by an uneasy juxtaposition of message (the dreadful burden of work) and image (how glorious and beautiful the world is), but Philip Glass's soundtrack is, if anything, even better, especially the majestic "Anthem" which won Glass a Golden Globe when it was lifted for use in "The Truman Show"!

Quite simply, a must see.
Twenty years after it's first release, Koyaanisqatsi is still a unique and ground-breaking combination of video footage.
Until you have seen these films, you cannot begin to appreciate how much the techniques pioneered by Godfrey Reggio in filming these productions have influenced so much televisual imagery over the past two decades.
Arty pretentiousness aside, I think that everyone should be MADE to watch Koyaanisqatsi - not because it is profound, but because it is, just simply, beautiful.

Within these films time-lapse filming (speeding-up the very slow) and slow-motion has been targeted at subject matter with such genius that it is impossible not to view both the natural world, and technically-laden humanity, in a different light.

Cutting to the chase, let's clarify what's on offer here.
The films in the Koyaanisqatsi trilogy are NOT standard Hollywood feature-film productions - these films essentially are breath-taking video footage married very well to a soundtrack of looped music...
The films in the Koyaanisqatsi trilogy are NOT aimed at any age group, culture, or creed - assuming you are open-minded and (initially) patient most people will be glad they have watched them.
The films in the Koyaanisqatsi trilogy ARE essential to anyone who has a home cinema, and occasionally wants to watch something a little different.
No bad language (no dialog at all), no violence and sex (difficult with no cast to speak of), and yet profound and totally watchable.
How many films can this be said of?