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Koyaanisqatsi / Powaqqatsi (2 Pack)
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Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audience Rating: G (General Audience)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 9780792853442
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
ISBN: 079285344X
Label: MGM (Video & DVD)
Languages: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
MPN: D1003913D
Number Of Items: 2
Publisher: MGM (Video & DVD)
Region Code: 1
Release Date: September 17, 2002
Running Time: 184 minutes
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Theatrical Release Date: January 01, 1983
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Editorial Review:
Koyaanisqatsi
First-time filmmaker Godfrey Reggio's experimental documentary from 1983--shot mostly in the desert Southwest and New York City on a tiny budget with no script, then attracting the support of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas and enlisting the indispensable musical contribution of Philip Glass--delighted college students on the midnight circuit and fans of minimalism for many years. Meanwhile, its techniques, merging cinematographer Ron Fricke's time-lapse shots (alternately peripatetic and hyperspeed) with Glass's reiterative music (from the meditative to the orgiastic)--as well as its ecology-minded imagery--crept into the consciousness of popular culture. The influence of Koyaanisqatsi, or "life out of balance," has by now become unmistakable in television advertisements, music videos, and, of course, similar movies such as Fricke's own Chronos and Craig McCourry's Apogee. Reggio shot a sequel, Powaqqatsi (1988), and completed the trilogy with Naqoyqatsi (2002). Koyaanisqatsi provides the uninitiated the chance to see where it all started--along with an intense audiovisual rush.
Powaqqatsi
Powaqqatsi (1988), or "life in transformation," is the second part of a trilogy of experimental documentaries whose titles derive from Hopi compound nouns. The now legendary Koyaanisqatsi (1983), or "life out of balance," was the first. Naqoyqatsi (2002), or "life in war," was 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
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - koyannisqatsi - chaotic life
koyaanisqatsi/powaqqatsi - powerful film portrayal of mankind's development on planet earth. Possible demise of it. Only commercial film w/no audio script. No need for it as the imagery allows viewer to put their own needed meaning and outcome. Showing the evolutionary process of life and technology, warfare, etc. possible self-destruction of life itself if not resources needed to support itself.
Rating: - Awsome
Get these movies and Baraka for a new film experience. These will you have you talking about all sorts of topics that you never thought of. I let these movies play in the background of parties and everyone has to ask about them. I am glad I stumbled upon these.
Rating: - Thought provoking Journey
These follow up's Baraka for example are excellent viewing. Sometime we forget how fortunate we truly are.
Rating: - terrific dvd
Koyaanisqatsi is what I would call an "architectural" movie (actually it is more of an artful documentary than a 'movie'): Well-designed images of our world, and society's impact on the natural environment. People and cars date the movie a bit, but in general, it is a timeless work of art.
Rating: - Koyaanisqatsi/Powaaqqatsi - cd 2pack
Excellent films, great music. Provocative.
They (with the third, yet unavailable 3rd
piece of the Qatsi trilogy, aid in understanding
our impact on and separation from the natural
world. No story, no dialogue just visuals and
music. The Glass's music has great impact
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