Political activism takes many forms and exists on many levels. On the national level, organizations raise money to elect and lobby candidates in their own interests. On the community level, a group might sponsor an ad campaign, gather signatures for a petition or a hold a local event to raise awareness. And on the individual level, everything from the food one chooses to buy to the beliefs one expresses while in company can spark new thoughts and a change in the behavior of those nearby. When it comes to the personal choices one makes, artists have yet another option—to unleash their beliefs and feelings into the world through their art. This is what Frances Ford Coppola does with his 1982 film, Koyaanisqatsi.
Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word whose shades of meaning include “crazy life”, “life out of balance” and “a way of life that calls for another way of life”. Coppola illustrates it through his juxtaposition of a classical Philip Glass score and Hopi chanting, by confronting viewers with the disparities between things wrought by nature and things that are man-made. It is an avant-garde film—perhaps not excessively so for somebody that has gone near the visual arts scene in 2012. The film itself has no characters, only scenes of the Earth and the variety that spreads across its surface. It tells a story but does not have a plot, nor narration. Its slow pace could make it more difficult to ingest for people used to the fast flashes of today’s movies, to six-minute-tops YouTube videos. The way that it lingers on each scene stresses in viewer’s minds the passing of time. It emphasizes the enormity of all things nature created, the cheap transience of what humans make, and how quickly humans can destroy both.
The scenes of nature that the movie begins with are mostly landscapes—deserts, oceans, mountains, clouds—that hit the viewer with the grandeur of the Earth. One could find beauty on a smaller scale, but rather than focusing on plants and animals, Coppola decides to highlight the vastness of the planet. Watching it makes you feel small. Taking in the massive mountains—that stand for countless human lifetimes—makes you feel insignificant. You realize how slowly the land forms, ages and changes on its own. It dawns on you how small a fraction of time you’ll be alive in its presence. In the scenes with clouds, racing or rapidly shifting, you notice that fluidity and movement are also a part of the earth’s equilibrium. It illustrates how, though faster at changing than huge rock formations, water and the atmosphere do not leave a trace of a scar. They, and whatever they carve over time, fit neatly into their place in nature, however chaotic or uncontrollable humans find them. The shot taken from a plane as it flies just above the surface, over mountain, tree and water—the horizon rushing towards the viewer—gives you the sense of something limitless.
Entering the scenes of human creations, viewers encounter a very different set of ideas. Some sort of land-clearing vehicle, quickly obscured by the black smoke of its own expulsion, marks the ominous transition. It disappears completely into the fumes—you never see it move, but the scenes begin to shift, and explosions begin and spread. The mountains—whose strength and endurance you had just finished appreciating—crumble to debris in seconds. Power lines cut across skylines, power plants flatten the landscape they lie on, and the level of variety on the Earth’s surface plummets. Soon, the only surfaces you see are flat ones—glass, concrete, sidewalks, walls. Soon, things become predictable. Lights switch on and off in windows as sunlight slides over and past them. Assembly lines run on a repeat loop endlessly, churning out everything from cars to prepackaged food. Highways grow crowded at the same time every day because the practices of a human society demand it. Life has sunk into a rushed routine. And for what? As you watch, you get the sense that humans are making themselves part of a machine that runs their lives, one that they’ve constructed themselves. Soon the images shift again, and you see humans tearing down their own creations. TNT winds and snaps through city buildings, making them rubble as dust spreads outwards. You see flashes of today’s tools of war–the magnitude of the world’s investment in military technology. Military aircraft, aircraft carriers, tanks, and missiles give way to the explosions of the atomic bomb. In the final scene, we watch a space rocket rise into the atmosphere and explode due to a malfunction. Even after the rest of the rocket has disintegrated, a shard of its booster continues to consume fuel and spew out flames as it falls, spinning, from the sky. An unintended catastrophe, but a catastrophe nonetheless—and, some might argue, a highly preventable one.
The movie employs both sound and visuals to express its heavy symbolism. Throughout the movie, the music relates to what Coppola wishes to convey. The chanting of the phrase “koyaanisqatsi” is only present during the scenes with the spacecraft—during the opening credits, and during the last scene. These are the scenes that put an emphasis on the wastefulness of human practices that are completely unnecessary to life. The instrumentals sound smoother, softer and sweeping during the opening landscapes and quicker, more urgent and panicky, as the film phases into the details of human creation. The use of humans themselves in the film is also symbolic. The cave paintings at the beginning and end of the film show a type of human expression that can endure almost as long as the rock itself—a form of expression that came about before mankind upset the balance of life on the planet. The moving portraits of modern humans, meanwhile, illustrate the fast pace of life today. Some people smile at the camera, others scowl and look away, and others pose, but all of them seem too occupied with their lives—with wherever they need to go next—to give much thought to most of what is around them. One shot even shows people lying on the beach as a horrible power plant hovers over them, just on the other side of a nearby fence. What this says is that modern humans are too preoccupied with their conveniences to care much about sustainability. They’re too busy, and too estranged from the planet, to create anything truly lasting.
There’s a line from an e.e. cummings poem that goes, “Progress is a comfortable disease”—and that fits the theme of this movie exactly. To me, that line rings true. The surface of our planet—the very literal landscape—has been transformed by human greed, and our lives haven’t gotten any better in the process. What is progress, anyway? The earliest human societies were hunter-gatherers. They were communal, and small enough that everybody knew everybody else; there was no currency, not even any form of permanent settlement. There were also no homeless shelters, no orphanages, and no gas stations, because these things simply weren’t needed. People took care of each other. They had what they needed to live. Today, people in huge swaths of the world have more. They have much more than is enough, and they still don’t feel like it’s enough. So what has progress done? Has it taught us to be humbler, more compassionate, and more appreciative of what we have?
I’m not suggesting that scientific inquiry and business activity must halt—these things have always been a part of human life, and always will be. But, as Koyaanisqatsi shows, mankind is destroying the bounty of its own home. Humans today don’t value the Earth enough to keep from stripping it down and wasting it. What I’m saying is that our gifts can be used to bring us to a future where we’re still connected to the roots of our humanity, rather than to some stressful, unhealthy, unsustainable machine we’ve created. It’s a different kind of progress—one based on people acting in their own self-interest without being selfish. And, yes, it is possible. It can happen if people stop being hasty and recognize that when they improve the quality of life for the people and creatures around them, they do so for themselves. I believe that we will only have achieved real progress when people value everything that nature gives them and remember, as some cultures have long taught, that nobody floats above the web of life on this planet.
