WATER AND POWER
Yet O’Neill’s film is about much more than local California history, though it takes this water diversion as a starting point and frequently juxtaposes the urban desert of LA and the salt-flat desert around the lowered Mono Lake as a reminder of cause and effect. O’Neill’s grander theme is the imposition of human-made patterns on nature, as well as the way in which, in our mechanized landscape and our mechanized perception of landscape, nature and industrial civilization have interpenetrated each other to such a degree that they have become almost inseparable. Behind the stunningly dense and seductively beautiful images that O’Neill serves up lie four separate elements that occur and recur in ever new combinations like the themes of a piece of polyphonic music: nature itself, the fixed structures we have built on our landscape, the more fleeting presence of the human body as it moves across the landscape, and the narratives, the little stories, that we humans invent and act out as we course across the land.
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In his first shot O’Neill relies only on the relatively simple time-lapse technique, yet much of the film depends on the technical wizardry for which he is well-known (he earns his living doing special-effects work for Hollywood productions). Thus a specially designed computer-controlled camera allows slow, regular camera movements to be combined with time-lapse photography, and the optical printer–a device that allows frame-by-frame rephotographing (the basis of much Hollywood special-effects work)–allows portions of one image to be fused seamlessly with parts of another image from a very different space.
By making technique part of his film’s subject, O’Neill displays a self-effacing honesty lacking in the work of filmmakers who wish to offer the viewer a definite, clear, predigested message. By appearing to suggest that at times his technique parallels nature’s forces and at other times the industrialized world, O’Neill encourages the viewer to become an active participant in the perceiving and evaluating of each of his images. Active perception is also encouraged by the fact that so many images present themselves as bizarre, even jarring visual paradoxes in which parts of images from different spaces are combined in unexpected ways. Indeed, each image can be seen as asking the viewer a series of questions and as asking the viewer to inquire of the image, “What am I? Of what components am I created? What meaning do those components have in the world?”
By the film’s end O’Neill’s time-lapse, which may at first seem like a banal trick to make urban bustle seem even more bustling, is revealed to be something far more profound. The same time-lapse that makes the movements of sun and clouds visible comes to seem as “natural” as real film time, a way of making visible those grand movements that bring us air and water, heat and light, day and night, and make life on earth possible. It is in their time scale–which, the film seems to be arguing, is clearly as legitimate as our own–that our own body movements seem frenetic and fleeting. Which leads us to perceive a further irony–that the huge buildings beside the runners, built by fellow humans, are (barring an earthquake) likely to outlast all of us. The point is that the ways in which we have altered the land are far more lasting than the fleeting movements of humans and their vehicles that those alterations support.
But there is one sequence in Koyaanisqatsi that I really learned something from. A montage of modernist, “international style” skyscrapers–all of which we are presumably supposed to see as ugly–culminates in some footage of a group of vacant buildings being blown up. I was able to make an interesting connection here, for I happened to recognize the buildings being demolished as the legendary Pruitt-Igoe low-income housing project in Saint Louis, which was such a failure that it was eventually blown up at the suggestion of its residents. The architect of this project, Minoru Yamasaki, was also the architect of New York’s World Trade Center, one of the buildings seen in the montage that precedes the demolition. But the important point is that there’s no sign that Godfrey Reggio, the film’s director, had any sense of that connection in the way that he edited the sequence. Many architects and architectural historians regard the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe as a kind of death knell for the modernist aesthetic, a sign of its failure. But Reggio’s montage-analysis is not an analysis at all; it’s more a series of epithets, as in “See all these ugly boxes.” Because there is no sense that the filmmaker knows the specifics of his material, the audience is encouraged to react to it only on a gut level and not to think about it in a serious way.
