Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1277 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

The most remarkable cinema experience I've ever had
I saw this film when it first came out and have probably played the DVD 50+ times since. The first time I saw it in the cineme I was bowled over by its impact and the music and made sure that the next time I saw it in the cinema (the very next day) that I was sitting in the very front row and I simply let the whole imagery wash over me and engulf me totally. Amazing on DVD but even more remarkable in the cinema.... if its ever re-released for Cinema release make sure you see it there as well as keeping the DVD for private indulgence!

Breathtaking
For me Koyaanisqatsi is the music. The images give it meaning and tell a story, but without the music the film wouldn't have half the impact it does. Philip Glass's score is surely one of the most memorable pieces written in the 20th century, and created a whole new genre of music. Amazing what can be achieved with few chords and repetition of simple scales, but despite the obvious repetition, it's also very complicated and subtle when analysed. The timing is continually changing, the layers build up, and earlier sequences are constantly reused, to the point where you wonder if you've been listenning to the same five notes for 80 minutes. An amazing piece of writing by a modern master.

Interesting how many times the music has been used in adverts, and the imagery has been copied endlessly as well. Also worth pointing out the incredible time, effort and dedication it must have took to film all the time-lapse sequences, especially the cloud sections.

One of the most exhilarating and moving films I've seen. The grid is by far the best section and builds up to a breathtaking climax. The end sequence is superb too, from the triumphal launch, through the explosion and ending with the rocket booster plunging endless to earth licked by flames, as if showing the folly of mans ambitions.

You will not regret buying this.

Yesterday...
I watched this film yesterday. I felt like the bottom dropped out of my world, and when it finished my heart was twice the size it had been before. Sharpy and I just sat while the credits rolled, it didn't feel appropriate to move. After everyone had left we walked home in silence.

It was gut wrenchingly beautiful and saddening. For the first 20 minutes I thought it was going to be purely aesthetic...trying to decide whether what you can see is clouds or the sea is a little strange...but when, after 20 minutes of watching footage of some of the bleakest uninhabited landscapes on the planet, you get a closeup of the oil mining industry, it feels like a punch in the stomach.Speeded up shots of spaghetti junctions make the traffic look like red blood cells in the biology videos we used to watch in class. A closeup of an old womans hand with an IV drip and bloodstained tape holding it in place...she reaches out her hand to the nurse changing her IV and the nurse takes her hand for a second. Then you can see, but it's almost imperceptible, the nurses grip loosen as she's about to let go, and every part of you is begging her not to, but you never see. The shot changes before she lets go of the old womans hand. And you know she did, because you could see she was going to, but the tension that was in your body doesn't leave with that knowledge. Sunbathers on a beach overlooked by a factory. Tourists in the factory taking pictures.

It's impossible to describe how a film with no dialogue and essentially no plot, made of a series of pieces of footage put together with a soundtrack comprising mostly an organ and some bass singers can affect someone this much. So watch it.