🎬 #224 Purest of Sound & Vision
Sometimes you just have to cocoon yourself in music and wrap yourself in images and let their impact wash over you.
Please enjoy
Bry
FILM: POWAQQATSI
1988
Dir Godfrey Reggio
1 hrs 39 mins
This is the second film in the trilogy by director Godfrey Reggio, which begins with Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and concludes with Naqoyqatsi (2002). All the titles are from the Hopi language, and this one roughly translates as “life in transition.” But in the end titles, the fuller translation is “an entity, a way of life that consumes the life forces of other beings in order to further its own life.” That is the overarching theme of the film’s visual orchestrations through to the end. It begins with chains of men carrying mud or raw material from a pit in gorgeous slow motion. Caked in mud, we eventually see them carrying a man who has passed out, or worse, from the sheer intensity of the work. The visuals allude to one thing feeding another, with humanity largely being the skin ants feeding the larger beast that can barely be grasped.
As with the other films in the series, this is a portrait of human life on Earth. And even when the grim reality is captured, people trying desperately in desperate places to fend for themselves, every frame and every note from Philip Glass’s score is beautiful. Out of clouds of dust emerge smiling kids, best friends unfazed by the collapse of their environment. Out of the throngs of a bustling street scene comes a beautiful face, glimpsed in focus for just a moment, striking among the grey, sun-soaked streets. Conveyor-ed earth spills, seemingly over the brand-new high-rise buildings sprouting in its place. This is a stunning shot, like so much of the film, that says so much without saying anything at all: the cost of construction is destruction of some kind or another. This is a beautiful, dark film best enjoyed with focus, while still letting things drift. Fans of The Truman Show will hear some familiar Philip Glass in there, just gorgeous.