Sunday, April 12, 2009

April 11, 2009

Koyaanisqatsi (1983)
The closest I can come to trying to describe this movie is to call it a live-action version of Fantasia. In Fantasia, Disney took pre-existing classical music and animated stories to go with it. In this, filmmaker Godfrey Reggio takes images of the earth and humanity's existance on it and, through both slow and fast-motion, sets the pictures to Phillip Glass's haunting score. There are no characters, no dialogue, and no plot, but it manages to tell a story anyway. This (along with Fantasia, if you want to count it as that) is one of, if not the only experimental film I like. It's part of a trilogy (followed by Powaqatsi and Naqoyqatsi) but I don't find them nearly as effective. The title is a Hopi word meaning "life out of balance."
My Netflix rating: 4 stars

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