Hailed by audiences and critics around the world as mesmerizing (The Detroit News), this second installment of writer/director Godfrey Reggio’s apocalyptic qatsi trilogy is quite simply one of the most magnificent visual and aural spectacles ever made (L.A. Daily News)! Combining stunning cinematography with the exquisite music of award-winning composer Philip Glass, Powaqqatsi is a breathtaking experience working on many levels’emotional, spiritual, intellectual andaesthetic (The Hollywood Reporter)! Bold, haunting and epic in scale, this extraordinary film calls into question everything we think we know about contemporary society. By juxtaposing images of ancient cultures with those of modern life, Powaqqatsi masterfully portrays the human cost of progress. It is a film that engages the soul as well as the mind; it is truly an absorbing experience (Movies on TV and Videocassette).Powaqqatsi, or “life in transformation,” is the second part of a projected trilogy of experimental documentaries whose titles derive from Hopi compound nouns. The now legendary Koyaanisqatsi, or “life out of balance,” was the first. Naqoyqatsi, or “life in war,” once it obtains funding, will be 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
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April 29, 2010
#1
In this film, Godfrey Reggio gives in to the MTV method of “persuasion”. The edits are often quick cuts, to the point where the viewer’s mind just shuts down so it can passively absorb the film’s message: that (as another reviewer has stated) economic “exploitation” produces poverty.
The film shows lots of backbreaking physical labor. It shows lots and lots and lots of poor, poor people. One of the most important images in the film is of a huge truck overtaking a young boy walking down a dusty street. The boy is engulfed in dust kicked up by the truck. I guess this means that trucks are bad.
The causes of poverty simply cannot be learned by viewing a mere progression of images without a story. If you try this, you only see how poor the poor are, and how rich the rich are, and you end up infering that one person’s great wealth causes another’s poverty. This is *the big lie* of the 20th century. This lie itself causes poverty, because it teaches people to waste time fighting the rich rather than learning to become rich.
Wealth is good. The pursuit of wealth is good. Yes, technological change can create unemployment for those with obsolete skills. But the extent to which technology has improved the world cannot be denied. Should technology providers feel guilty for making trucks available to people who used to use donkeys for transport? Should employers feel guilty for not wanting to hire people with obsolete skills? Hell no.
The subject matter of Powaqqatsi could have been delivered much more honestly — it could have showed more of the abject misery of life before technology compared to the reduced misery after it. Instead, it shows people working very hard (and suffering) in semi-technological societies, and it tacitly implies technology is the cause of the hard labor and suffering. As if the labor and suffering wasn’t harder before technology!
Koyaanisqatsi was a much better film: it allowed for a reasonable interpretation of the images. This film simply assaults you with pain, and hopes your anger will do the talking.
It is telling that the promotional tag-line for the film, “Life in Transformation”, isn’t in the film. The film, at its end, instead defines Powaqqatsi as “an entity, a way of life, that consumes the life forces of other beings in order to further its own life”. In other words: parasitism. I guess, though, that “Life consuming life” or “Industrial Leeches” wasn’t vague enough to sell the movie to unsuspecting consumers. I bought this DVD hoping to see how technology has beneficially transformed impoverished nations (even if that wasn’t the directors intention).
What a slap in the face.
April 29, 2010
#2
I was looking forward to the “statement” on culture that the packaging promised, but instead I watched what turned out to be a very long music video with many extremely disparate images juxtaposed to give some message that I wasn’t getting. In fact, I’m not sure there was much of a message–the filmmakers might have intended there to be one, but it’s buried in a mix of visual images that are certainly striking, but definitely not cohesive enough to make the message clear.
The filmmakers also have decided to focus solely on the grim side of culture, and there are so few smiling faces here that it makes you wonder if two-thirds of the people in the world live each day with grim, depressed looks on their faces. By using slow motion so much, they tend to pull the dynamic side of life completely out of the picture, and it grows old very quickly. Where are the playing children? And as another reviewer said, they left out the abominable side of the third world, such as beatings and executions, and they’ve also left out the graft and corruption that make it difficult for anyone to help people in these countries.
I felt all along that I was being manipulated, forced to watch images of their choice so that my worldview would become what they desired my worldview to be. As a film, this is much better watched in segments, music piece by music piece, perhaps, as it does grow old after half an hour or so. All in all, this is a beautiful effort, but beauty, of course, does not make for substance and depth (or even cohesion), which are elements that this film is lacking.
April 29, 2010
#3
I’m a tremendous Philip Glass fan. In fact, the Powaqqatsi soundtrack is what first turned me on to him. I also loved Koyaanisqatsi. But I’ve tried to watch Powaqqatsi twice now – once on the big screen, and once again at home – and it put me to sleep both times. The music is beautiful, as are the images. But whereas there was a good bit of variety in the imagery of Koyaanisqatsi (slow motion, fast motion, nature scenes, city scenes…) this film couples slower, more thoughtful music, with nothing but slow motion film. The combination of the two I found to be powerfully sedating. I must also say that the music on the CD doesn’t seem to quite match what was in the movie, IIRC. I seem to recall the CD having quieter music interspersed with more powerful music. In any case, I found Koyaanisqatsi the movie far more fulfilling. (Though I still highly recommend the Powaqqatsi soundtrack!)
April 29, 2010
#4
Very disappointed. While I cannot say enough good things about Koyannisqatsi, Powaqqatsi left me bored, looking for something interesting to watch. The genius that Reggio and Glass displayed in Koyannisqatsi is not to be found here. I understand what they are trying to do, but it is just not entertaining. I think Reggio forgot that when making a movie with out dialogue or plot, the pictures need to be either of something interesting, spectacular, original with interesting moments. And Powaqqatsi has few of these moments.
Monotonous and bland, Reggio’s camera has agonizingly long shots that move from third world human misery to more human misery. He’s preaching here, and in this mode it does not work. Glass’ sounds track is little better, sounding much like the score from Koyannisqatsi with a tracks of children singing and bong drums over top.
Essentially, Powaqqatsi is just more of the same from Koyannisqatsi, but all the interesting and beautiful shots are removed. It’s now only the parts they called “People Moving Slowly” form the first one. At times this worked in the first movie because it showed the juxtaposition of the inhuman technology and the very human faces. Now it’s just miserable people in slums or people working in conditions that look like slave labour. No juxtaposition, just more sadness.
If you want to see a great movie of a similar vein that does what Powaqqatsi should have done, buy Baraka. Baraka is everything that Powaqqatsi should have been. It’s directed by the same cinematographer and so offers much of the same as Koyannisqatsi, minus the technology. It shows interesting things in the third world, people with dignity, other civilizations, not just muddy, miserable souls. Baraka has the interesting sequences, different perspectives, striking photography and original fantastic moments. It’s all I had hoped for in Powaqqatsi but did not see.
So do yourself a favor, forget about Powaqqatsi and get Baraka
April 29, 2010
#5
Hoo boy, Ron Fricke is sorely missed in this second installment of the Qatsi trilogy. I found the film lacking the visual sweep, thematic unity, and relentless momentum of Koyaan. If the mine worker in the first scene hadn’t accidentally had a rock dropped on his head, I don’t know how Reggio would have had any material at all with which to glue this effort together. Hopefully Naqoy will pull the set up from this artistic low point. Skip Powaq and check out Ron Fricke’s Baraka instead — a much more cohesive and visually compelling tour of third world locations and cultures, though only occasionally touching on the emergent industrialization theme.