Naqoyqatsi
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Movie Reviews of Naqoyqatsi
Movie Review: POWERFIL VISUAL METAPHPOR OF DIGITECH WAR
Summary: 4 Stars
Godfrey Reggio's NAQOYQATSI translates "Life As War" and tackles humans versus technology. Does the global digital wiring that increasingly infiltrates our everyday lives infect our waking and dreaming minds? Flowing visual metaphors of manipulated images of intimacy, scope, despair, achievement and hope wash up in waves of near mandala-like patterns until the viewer succumbs to a semi-trance state, partly induced by the music of composer Phillip Glass and cellist Yo-Yo Ma.Movie Review: Quite a good end to the trilogy
Summary: 4 Stars
Well, I don't think that "Naqoyqatsi" is so bad stuff. The same way I don't think that is the masterpiece of the "Qatsi" trilogy. There are a very good visual moments, nice ideas about how the technology rules our lives, about the power of digital world in our society. Philip Glass with yo Yo Ma are great, as usual. "Naqoyqatsi" is a real nice third chapter to this fabulous trilogy.Movie Review: not quite like its older sisters
Summary: 4 Stars
beautiful photography and the musical score is not quite so repetitively redundant as the predecessors, but the production in general moves much more slowly. That is sometimes to its advantage; it is, so to speak, less exciting and more contemplative. If I had it to do all over again I'd do it all over again (buy this DVD, that is). Just be prepared for a change of pace.Movie Review: A Natural Progression In Message, Not Form.
Summary: 3 Stars
The final installment to the Godfrey Reggio-Philip Glass trilogy, a series of dialogue-less movies which documents the transformation from serene and organic Mother Earth to present-day artificial cyber-repetitiveness.
Many of the complaints filed by devoted followers of first movie Koyaanisqatsi stem from the notion that Naqoyqatsi is overblown with bells-and-whistles artifice, lacking the mystique and shamanistic qualities of Koyaanisqatsi. I tend to agree, in the sense that cinematographer Russell Lee Fine apparently throws every special effects filter into his digitized computer editing software for Naqoyqatsi. Throughout the movie, I frequently asked whether the film-makers have made a technical mistake and put the entire movie on negative film (as opposed to positive film), thereby generating practially 90% of the images in reverse. Is Fine trying to show us that viewing a reverse image will somehow enable us to penetrate into the depths of a setting? This would be akin to using big words to describe deep thoughts.
I think an oversight of Naqoyqatsi naysayers is that they overlooked the notion that this closing installment is, in fact, a continuum, a fulfillment of the prophecy set up by the Hopi words in the preceding two movies: Koyaanisqatsi (1. Crazy life. 2. Life in Turmoil 3. Life out of balance 4. Life disintegrating 5. A state of life that calls for another way of living), and Powaqqatsi (An entity, a way of life, that consumes the life force of other beings, in order to further its own life). Koyaanisqatsi, in 1983, visually predicted a future where cosmopolitan grids would be no larger than a micro-processor chip. Naqoyatsi merely realizes this prophecy.
If one were to inspect our present environment, our popular movies, and our daily household surroundings, it would become obvious that much of our world has been digitized. Naqoyqatsi presents that reality quite accurately. A trilogy of works is often a documentation of elapsed time, for the creator of the artpiece as well as his or her audience. Certainly Koyaanisqatsi's cinematographer Ron Fricke, is acquainted with that concept, as his other film along the same genre, is entitled Chronos. For Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass to return to the format of their initial movie after some twenty years, would have been a dreadful mistake that would shortchange an artist's evolutionary vision.
What I find lacking in Naqoyqatsi, is the spiritual insight, an earthy shamanism that reveals all that we see around us, but fail to realize. Koyaanisqatsi was singularly the most influential movie in my life, as I often revisit the concept of time, the repetitiveness of our lives, and the way we squander our short stay here over negligable tradeoffs. Koyaanisqatsi was a wake-up call that forced me rethink and spend my lifetime searching for another way of living. Naqoyqatsi, in contrast, is a sign of the times: It does not question, it does not seek. It is simply content with its artificial digitized CGI (computer generated images) reality, and expects us to accept it, unquestioningly.
And that, is its deepest message.
Movie Review: Good, but not quite up to its predecessors...
Summary: 3 Stars
The first two films of the Qatsi trilogy were made up of organic images accompanied by the music of Philip Glass. Astonishing achievements, they are, mostly because of this. The use of "found" images to tell a story - without dialog or a three-act screenplay - is quite an accomplishment.So, in the third installment, what was left to achieve? The opposite: to tell a story with synthetic images, but also without reliance on dialog, characters, or formal dramatic structure. A purely abstract film, in other words, where every image could be controlled precisely. The result is Godfrey Reggio's Naqoyqatsi, which, in my opinion, is not quite abstract enough.
When relying on "real" images (i.e., representational) exclusively, you have to find metaphors and make connections indirectly. Koyaanisqatsi's most powerful example of this is a shot toward the end where we see an elderly person's hand emerge from an endless row of hospital beds seen obliquely so that they are nothing more than diagonal lines of metal and plastic. It's a haunting moment - humanity reaching out from the suffocating cocoon of technology it has woven about itself; reaching out for contact with something real.
But the computer-enhanced (and often computer generated) work in Naqoyqatsi goes for the obvious most of the time. Instead of oblique metaphors, we get transliterations: actual ones and zeros flying around the screen to represent information overload; corporate logos in 3-D zooming at us to tell us how pervasive they are - complete with the obvious Cheap Shot at Corporate Greed: the dreaded Enron logo; dollar signs raining on stock traders at the NYSE. And so on.
It's mostly clumsy. We even have a double-image of Dolly the cloned sheep intercut with shots of human eggs being artificially fertilized, followed by a big digital pull-back of lots and lots of naked babies, who are really the same four or five babies repeated endlessly. There is a certain aesthetic beauty in the work - the patterns are reminiscent of Salvador Dali's lattices of insects becoming clock hands; the periodic morphs, of his penchant for landscapes becoming faces. But as a whole, these images lack the elegance that marked the first two Qatsis. They're just too obvious.
That being said, Philip Glass' score is sublime. It's among his better works, eschewing strict minimalist formalism, while maintaining a minimalist kind of simplicity. It features some of the best Neo-Romantic orchestral writing I have heard in some time - a great counterpoint to the cold, industrial images of the film.
For the Completist, I recommend Naqoyqatsi. It's by no means a bad film. But for someone unfamiliar with the Qatsi aesthetic, I wouldn't start with this one. You need a grounding in the artistic sensibilities of the first two films to appreciate what does - and does not - work in this one.