Koyanasqastsi, Life Out Of Balance

None of us has time to do any of this, but just watch the video and then we'll talk!
This cap-wearing shoddily clad street musician playing in a DC metro station is actually Joshua Bell, last year voted  the best classical musician in the US. He is heard playing the Chacone in D minor by JS Bach, a most difficult and poignant violin piece that has the wrong idea to last 14 minutes, a long time for a violin solo. Then he played Schubert's Ave Maria and on and on through a program of the best violin music of all times. For his day's effort he collected $32.and one compliment, the lady with the bag that recognized him, having seen him perform at the Library of Congress.

Question: are you the lady with the white plastic bag? the distracted guy against the wall or one of the crowd? This thoughtful experiment by the Washington Post uses the effective technique of speeding up time to convey the mood of that crowd.

Now go below to view a trailer of Godfrey Reggio's classic Koyanasqastsi,  a wordless and plotless avant-garde movie made in 1984. In this dark series of takes of Americans going nowhere like robots, speeding on aimlessly on the minimalist and redundant score by Phillip Glass, there is a feeling that grabs you like three months of transcendental meditation wearing nothing but flip-flops and a towel. Disarming and powerful...maybe life-changing! Still widely available (Amazon), I urge viewers to buy the DVD as a primer to what I need to say. Temporarily, watch the trailer below. 

Better still buy the entire quadralogy, the Qatsi films as they are called. 

I actually met Godfrey Reggio in 1987 when I was running the Archimede plant in the EastGate Industrial Park of Los Alamos, NM.  Across the street was a company that made cameras capable of taking 1,500,000 frames per second. These were used to film particle traces in cyclotrons and also to photograph atomic explosions by the friendly crowd of the Los Alamos National Laboratory a few miles down the road. This ex-Christian Brother monk turned social activist turned cinematographer was shopping equipment for his next movie. He barely said two words to me. Twenty years later, I understand why. But this morning as I was looking desperately for the name of that movie so that I could recommend it to Stephanie, a dear friend, I fell on Reggio's entry in Wikipedia. It gives me a lot of pleasure to reprint these thoughts of his below, copied from that entry. Incidently, it's not Kayanasquaasi, but  'Koyanasqastsi" is a Hopi word meaning , "Life Out Of Balance", 

something conveyed by both of these video clips. 

Now it's your turn to talk to us, the out of balance crowd, Mr Reggio:

• About the Qatsi films: "It's not that we use technology, we live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, so we are no longer conscious of its presence. So what I decided to do in making these films is to rip out all the foreground of a traditional film--the foreground being the actors, the characterization, the plot, the story--I tried to take the background, all of that that's just supported like wallpaper, move that up into the foreground, make that the subject, ennoble it with the virtues of portraiture, and make that the presence."

• About the computer: "The utopia of the technological order is virtual immortality. Hithertofore only ascribed to the gods, to the divinity. Now we have a new pantheon, the computer sits in the middle of it, the computer not being a sign, is the most powerful instrument in the world in that it produces what it signifies, it produces this globalization, in that sense it is the highest magic in the world, and something we are all in admiration of."

• About the creation of art: "In terms of the feeling of the piece, I cant think about what people are gonna think about it, what are the critics gonna say, I’m trying to bring some resolution, and realize that myself. It’s a struggle; it’s a process that gets us this. It’s not like, I do write a scenario, and I do have a point of view, but at a certain point the words have to just disappear off the page as the image and the sound become that which you are responding to and it tells you how to shape it, it speaks to you, you're trying to stay in touch with it, which you’ve helped to create."

• About the relationship of man to environment: "What I’m trying to show is that the main event today is not seen by those of us that are living it, who see the surface of the newspapers, the obviousness of conflict, the social injustice of the market, […] but to me the greatest event or the most important event perhaps in our entire history, nothing comparable in the past with this event, is fundamentally unnoticed, and the event is the following: the transcending from all nature or the natural environment as a host of life for human habitation, into a technological milieu, into mass technology as the environment of life. So these films have never been about the effect of the technology, of industry, on people, it’s been that everything, politics, education, the finance structure […] the culture, religion, all of that exists within the host of technology. So it’s not the effect of, it is that everything exists with-in. It's not that we use technology, we live technology."

• About the relationship of man to technology: "I think Einstein said that ‘fish will be the last to know water.’ My film is premised on the idea, the tragic feeling, that humans will be the last to know Technology. That’s technology with a big T, not all the gadgets that we call technology, but Technology as the very terra firma."

(click on the triangle in this video)
Thanks a lot Reggio! You just knocked the shit out of the friggin workaholic techno-geek asshole I have become since the last time we met. Now pick up my cigar and let me have a quiet acid reflux moment!