Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN MAGNIFICENT 'POWAQQATSI' A MIXTURE OF REGGIO & GLASS Powaqqatsi is the Hopi word for "the sorcerer who steals from life,'' and the first sign of this film's unusual significance....
...Glass and Reggio's collaboration raises the idea of the "musical'' to philosophy...
...Credits include special thanks to Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, and Ted Turner...
...he blends his minimalist lyricism with indigenous instruments (especially some superb Andean flutes) and Amerindian, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern motifs...
...his Eden of natural beauty and traditional craftsmanship includes heavy, hard work...
...Reggio is no primitivist...
...Glass's music added another layer...
...The film avoids the cliched images of the networks when they periodically rediscover famine...
...The new film, the second in a planned trilogy, again combines their talents in a unique way...
...Koyaanisqatsi, or "life out of balance," was a wordless but musical documentary on life in the United States-the result of inspired teamwork between director Godfrey Reggio and composer Phillip Glass...
...Koyaanisqatsi seems a more successful film-partly, no doubt, because it depicts America with bizarre accuracy, even, comic relief...
...For the close, Glass composed a solemn organ solo with a chant of the Hopi title phrase, rendered in the bass style liturgies of Tibetan monks...
...Glass and Reggio seem to run out of ideas...
...Glass's major theme, superbly celebratory, is announced early, matching Reggio's shots of traditional ways of life, before a deluge of details documenting the squalor linked to progress...
...Few recent films have been more stirring...
...TOM O'BRIEN...
...Reggio also has a hard time visualizing the meaning of his newtitle...
...But Reggio can't film that answer...
...Even the first cities seen in the film are on a human scale, older third-world cities with modestly clean, working-class areas...
...If only the film's reach could exceed this breadth of support and its depth of conceptual grasp...
...But as his shots make clear, the work is either self-directed or involves self-employment in hunting, gathering, fishing, or carpentry...
...Any viewer of the first film knows how hard an act it would be to follow...
...Of course, such statistics say nothing about the distribution of wealth, quality of the workplace, or environmental peril...
...The screenplay traces the arc of a material and spiritual fall: innocence, sin, and hope for redemption...
...When they write the history of music in our time, one fact is sure: Glass and proponents of new music will be seen in their full colors, not just as innovators but also as reactionaries rebelling against the desiccation of melody, energy, and rhythm by musical modernism...
...Reggio renews our awareness of third-world suffering by focusing not on food but work, and the way that technology-when applied without sensitivity to ancient cultures-dehumanizes individuals even if building the wealth of nations...
...at others, it was just slow and repetitive...
...Glass employs high soprano and tenor lines of a Peruvian children's choir...
...From this state, Reggio's camera descends to urban shanty-towns, to the realm of Sin and Death, where his images reveal mainly boredom, agony, or torpor...
...With these limits, Powaqqatsi is still magnificent...
...The meaning of the title can't be proved visually...
...What images could rival Koyaanisqatsil The thoughts might have been cliched, but the art raised them to a grand, prophetic level...
...At times-aptly for the second work of a planned trilogy-it felt like the slow movement of a symphony...
...Reggio, a former Christian Brother who lives in New Mexico, here applies his religious feeling and passion for native cultures to a much larger subject, the "fate of the earth...
...it also amounts to one of the finest contemporary allusions to Bach...
...The final sequence in slow motion depicted a space launch blowing up- a scene at which one smugly snickered until the Challenger disaster...
...Glass's tuneful postlude relies not just on primitive sources...
...Talk about teamwork...
...He has UN studies, encyclicals, and other sources to fall back on, but all are words...
...That would be sorcery...
...They also personify another synthesis, experimental merging with mainstream cinema...
...In this new film, Glass's music, though not as powerful, is again synthesized with the visual material, a view of the third world industrializing...
...But Reggio was after bigger game: prophecy for spaceship earth...
...worse, the rhetoric of trickle-down and per-capita-income leaps for third-world "miracles" can be used to deny it...
...Life out of balance" is easier to depict than the way in which progress has played a sorcerer with the third world...
...With cinematographer Ron Fricke, Reggio filmed America, beginning with slow pans of places like Monument Valley, picking up speed with aerial shots of the West Coast and Midwest farmland, then intensifying his frames with time-lapse photography that caught the frenetic pace of cities like New York...
...Like its predecessor, Powaqqatsi brilliantly mixes electrifying music and stunning photography...
...Powaqqats's predecessor, Koyaanisqatsi (1983), earned cult status as an art theater release, followed by years on PBS's "Great Performances" and new life on the Turner Broadcasting System and on videotape...
...For starters, he composed grand majestic sonorities, then added rapid fire electronic staccato to match scenes of urban franticness...
...As in Koyaanisqatsi, Reggio and Glass's imagery has strong religious connotations...
...And Powaqqatsi has genuine problems...
...Backing for their maverick efforts came from Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and the hustlers Golan and Globus of Cannon Films...
...Indeed, in the tradition of encyclicals like Mater et magistra (which Reggio claims inspired him long ago) and the more recent Sollicitudo rei socialis, the film shows the vital connection between material and spiritual well-being...
...Beauty and the depiction of such complex truths are not as close as believers in the religion of art like to claim...
...Reggio concentrates on children, not hungry but angry ones-an African child scowling over raised fists, an Egyptian girl lashing cattle in fury...
Vol. 115 • May 1988 • No. 10
