Our Lives in Turmoil
Godfrey Reggio’s movie Koyaanisqatsi, made is 1983, is a film that can capture the attention of audience with only a single word being spoken. Reggio uses only images and music as he illustrates the beauty and horror of the world people live in. The director exemplifies the uniformity in technology and the irregularity in nature through the accretion and juxtaposition of images within his film.
In the beginning of the film, the beauty of nature is shown vividly. Nature is shown as a peaceful image and then suddenly the film switches to the front of a truck bulldozing the landscape. This juxtaposition of scenes comes suddenly and surprisingly. First, everything is calm. Then, everything is chaotic. Reggio uses outlooks such as this to explain to the viewer how technology is destroying nature and putting our life into turmoil. Also, when the film showed a picture of nature everything was curved and irregular while, the cities only had straight lines making everything look the same. These great technological cities created by men are nothing but bland and uniform lines. The beauty of the world is forgotten as the human race creates regularity. Every view of the city is layered on top of each other making the city and the technologies created by man seem less impressive. Reggio wants the observer to understand that the true beauty of the world lies within the nature that man is destroying. This argument by Reggio can be explained with the scene of the atomic bomb. As the mushroom cloud from the bomb slowly ascends towards the sky, the fear slowly enters the minds of all of the people viewing the movie. Reggio’s use of slow-motion and accretion creates the longest, most fearful buildup to an explosion that I have ever seen. The viewer can only watch as the movie shows countless times how technology is destroying our world. Each and every scene within Reggio’s movie presses his argument against technology.
The director’s argument is very much present throughout his movie. The word koyaanisqatsi means life in turmoil and that is what Reggio wants the viewer to know. The technology the human race has created is destroying the beauty of nature. Also, the technology the human race has created is destroying the asymmetrical nature and is replacing it with regular and featureless straight lines. Reggio uses the word koyaanisqatsi because we are destroying what makes our world diverse. I completely agree with Godfrey Reggio because soon our planet may become nothing more than a giant computer chip. A world without diversity is a world without beauty.
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