Koyaanisqatsi, in the language of the American Indians “Hopi”, is a word with a complex meaning: it indicates a crazy, tumultuous, unbalanced life. The message of the film, already clear in the cryptic title, is inspired by a prophecy engraved on the rock of a cave that appears in one of the first sequences: the dialectic between nature and progress that has seen nature forcefully supplanted by the presence of man, of mechanized civilization and technology. "What will be the fate of the world?", the director seems to ask himself. But Reggio's film is not a simple moralistic-ecological pamphlet but a true cinematographic poem, unique in its genre, without words, made of images and music perfectly fused together. His is a cosmic, visionary, poetic gaze, which proceeds by ‘illuminations’ like poetry, which tries to embrace everything and observe the whole of nature and its phenomena, letting reality speak and acting only on the speed of the shots, with slow motion and acceleration, in order to accentuate the emotional message. "I would like people to escape into reality and not from reality as happens with other films", the director once said, and with this film he leads the viewer into a privileged dimension, to trigger a process of awareness in him, to make him observe and judge the reality that surrounds us. The images of nature (the aerial shots of the Rocky Mountains and Monument Valley are wonderful), those of industrialization and those of the chaotic rhythm of contemporary American metropolises are orchestrated in ‘movements’, like a symphonic poem, by Philip Glass who participated in the making of the film from the shooting, giving the music a narrative and emotional structure inseparable from them, so much so that we often "hear the images and see the music". Koyaanisqatsi is a journey through time and space, a reflection on the world and the role of man, a film that took seven years to make and that used technology to condemn technology.
This film aims to compare the majesty of nature - lands, seas, skies - where it is still uncontaminated, with the precarious and often absurd achievements of humanity today, unmoored from the most essential and, indeed, natural values, launched into a crazy race. Natural and urban images follow one another in an editing that is sometimes accelerated or slowed down, punctuated by music that plays a key role.
