THE QATSI TRILOGY
by Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass
Over 25 years in the making and available for the first time in its entirety, the completed QATSI TRILOGY by avant garde filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass, has been reinvented as a live film and music concert special event designed to be shown on three consecutive evenings performed live by Philip Glass and the Philip Glass Ensemble. Individually, these abstract non-narrative and non-verbal moving pictures work both an intimate and global scale, together they represent a provocative vision of the state of civilization at the turn of the millennium. These spectacular live music and film events represent some of the most popular of the Philip Glass Ensemble's repertoire and have been shown to sold out houses on five continents and represent one of the most significant collaborations between a composer and filmmaker in the 20th Century.
KOYAANISQATSI: Life Out of Balance
POWAQQATSI: Life in Transformation
NAQOYQATSI: Life as War (Commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Arts)
Maya Beiser featured cello solo
"The films of the QATSI TRILOGY cross the borders of narrative cinema to offer a mediated experience of their subject. Their form is a fusion of image and music. It is my feeling that language, tragically, no longer describes the world, in which we live; that we approach this world with antique ideas and old formulas. Each film reverses the saying, 'a picture is worth a thousand words' by offering a thousand images to convey the power of one word. In effect, KOYAANISQATSI, POWAQQATSI and NAQOYQATSI are an effort to re-name the world in which we live –questioning what we consider the norms of daily living.
The central theme of the trilogy is a point-of-view facing the natural world- the technological milieu. From this vantage point, technology is not something we use, it is rather something we live; it is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. Technology is the new environment, it is new nature. Anything that could once be said of the divine can now be said of technology. The world is being re-made in the image and likeness of the computer. Its truth becomes the Truth. Being sensate, we become our environment; we become what we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we taste, what we touch. As the environment radically changes, so do we.
Because of the form and the intentional play of ambiguity, the films do not offer meaning or clarity in a conventional sense. They aspire to offer viewers a meaningful experience of the subject, and the meaning of that experience lies in the eye of the beholder. There can be as many meanings – or no meaning – for these films as there are viewers to see them. They strip cinema of its traditional foreground (characterization and plot) and make the background (the context of the story) the new foreground. The intention is to create inerasable impressions. Einstein said the fish will be the last to know water. Perhaps humans will be the last to know technology – that unseen 'water' in which we swim.
To re-see our world in the freedom of our own feelings, embraced by the breathing 'narration' of the Philip Glass scores, is the single aspiration of the QATSI TRILOGY. "
- Godfrey Reggio, 2004
THE MAKING OF THE QATSI TRILOGY
In 1975, Godfrey Reggio, a man who had spent 14 years in silence and prayer as a member of a contemplative religious order and then devoted his life to community service, latched onto an idea for a film that would create an entirely new motion picture style. His idea was to grab images from real life - emotional, raw, honest images - and present them in a non-verbal, non-linear fashion, forging a kind of concert cinema.
Seven years later, Reggio's first film, KOYAANISQATSI was released to critical acclaim. The film's Hopi-language title translates roughly as "Life Out of Balance," and this was Reggio's simple but searing theme as the film unveiled a vision of an urban society moving at a frenetic pace, detached from the natural environment and overwhelmed by technology. In images at once stark and beautiful, assaulting and hypnotizing, the film worked as a kind of visual aperitif to conversations that could last for days or weeks. During filmmaking, Reggio had invited the daring experimental composer Philip Glass to create a score for KOYAANISQATSI that was also to have a great influence on the film's reception -- and to spark a continuing collaboration between the two artists. Glass became an integral part of the film's creation, sitting in on editing sessions to help meld his trademark syncopated rhythms and rapid arpeggios to the images seamlessly.
The film won passionate fans around the world, including Francis Ford Coppola, who lent his name to the film as a presenter. In the 1980s, KOYAANISQATSI joined A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and ERASERHEAD at the top of rentals on U.S. college campuses. When broadcast on PBS' GREAT PERFORMANCES it drew the second-highest over-night rating in the history of the series. The film is also part of the permanent collections of 7 international art institutions including The National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, The Museum of Modern Art and the British Film Institute. The artistic influence of Reggio's style has also been seen extensively in music videos, motion picture cinematography and effects and the IMAX film phenomenon.
Fellow filmmaker George Lucas joined Francis Ford Coppola in presenting the second film in the QATSI series: POWAQQATSI, which translates to "Life in Transformation." For this new film, Reggio chose to go out into the world, into parts of developing nations rarely seen on screen in any format, and capture the impact of technological progress on native cultures. Over six months, he and his crew journeyed to twelve countries, including India, Egypt, Brazil, Peru, Kenya, Nepal and Nigeria, capturing ordinary people at work and play and revealing their complicated relationship with such new additions to their lives as cars and high-rises. The film drew a wide-range of critical and even political responses - attesting to its ability to touch audiences strongly. In Europe, the film received the 1988 Leonardo de Vinci Award for Best Film and Best Musical Score.
Since their initial release, KOYAANISQATSI and POWAQQATSI have been in theatrical release in over 60 countries, televised and on home video in over 30 countries, invited to over 70 worldwide film festivals and performed live with the Philip Glass Ensemble. The films have been seen by over 35 million people worldwide. Each of the QATSI films have utilized their own unique style: KOYAANISQATSI used time-lapse photography to bend the mind around its images, while POWAQQATSI turned to slow motion to focus on the visceral details of native life. With NAQOYQATSI the series again enters new visual territory, delving into images of advanced technology and digital manipulation with what Godfrey Reggio terms a "re-animated look." Unlike the previous two films, NAQOYQATSI features little location work, but instead uses a method described by Godfrey Reggio as "image as location."
© MIRAMAX FILM
KOYAANISQATSI: Life Out of Balance
Godfrey Reggio (1983)
85 minutes, Color
"Since its premiere in 1983, KOYAANISQATSI has assumed the stature of a modern film classic. Godfrey and I worked over a period of three years assembling the image and music of KOYAANISQATSI. This is a collaboration of film and music that is unprecedented in its intensity."
- Philip Glass
KO-YAA-NIS-KATSI (from the Hopi language) n. 1. Crazy life. 2. Life in turmoil. 3. Life disintegrating. 4. Life out of balance. 5. A state of life that calls for another way of living.
KOYAANISQATSI was conceived in 1974 as a non-verbal film integrating images, music and ideas. There is no plot, no actors and no dialogue except that between the viewer and the film. Created for a worldwide audience, KOYAANISQATSI conveys its message entirely through the universal language of image and sound requiring no translation. This intense collaboration resulted in a motion picture that forever transformed the unique relationship between music and the moving image. Around the world, filmmakers, video artists, and photographers as well as composers and musicians from classical to rock credit KOYAANISQATSI as a pivotal influence in shaping a new and unforgettable language.
CLICK HERE for press on KOYAANISQATSI
POWAQQATSI: Life in Transformation
Godfrey Reggio (1987)
102 minutes, Color
"POWAQQATSI is the second installment in Reggio's groundbreaking QATSI TRILOGY. In this film, he shows the impact of northern technological society on the traditional societies of the Southern Hemisphere. For me, this meant an exploration in indigenous music from many parts of the world that were new to me. This represents in a sense, my first synthesis of my own music style and traditions of world music."
- Philip Glass
PO-WAQ-QA-TSI (from the Hopi language, powaq sorcerer + qatsi life) n., an entity, a way of life, that consumes the life forces of other beings in order to further its own life.
POWAQQATSI is the second part of the Godfrey Reggio/Philip Glass QATSI TRILOGY. With a more global view than KOYAANISQATSI, Reggio and Glass' first collaboration, POWAQQATSI examines life on our planet, focusing on the negative transformation of land-based, human-scale societies into technologically driven, urban clones. POWAQQATSI contrasts ways of life and depicts how the lure of technology and mega-cities are affecting small-scale indigenous cultures. The film focuses on the traditions and customs of people living in Third World nations.. It shows how "progress" is luring more and more people into a pattern of meaningless consumption in place of real values.
CLICK HERE for press on POWAQQATSI
NAQOYQATSI: Life as War
Godfrey Reggio (2003)
89 minutes, Color
"The QATSI TRILOGY–an extended collaboration between filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and myself–began with KOYAANISQATSI in '81, continued with POWAQQATSI in '88 and finally completed with NAQOYQATSI in 2001. It presents a cohesive and poetic vision of the modern world as it rockets toward the end of the 20th century and, in its last moments, anticipates the century to come. Each of the films is set within a unique visual and musical language. No text or actors are included. It's to Godfrey's credit that he manages to leave us with enduring, powerful images and a picture of our world at times both frightening and profoundly compelling. The message of the film in it's clarity and vividness is not meant to simply explain but, in it's most contemplative aspect, to question and inspire."
- Philip Glass
NA-QOY-QATSI: (nah koy' kahtsee) N. From the Hopi Language. <eachother-kill many-life> 1. A life of killing each other. 2. War as a way of life. 3. (Interpreted) Civilized violence.
The third and final feature film in the QATSI TRILOGY, NAQOYQATSI merges the power of image and music to plunge into the heart of he hyper-accelerated, globally wired 21st century. Mesmerizing images plucked from everyday reality, then visually altered with state-of-the art digital techniques, chronicle the shift from a world organized by the principles of nature to one dominated by technology, the synthetic and the virtual. Extremes of intimacy and spectacle, tragedy and hope fuse in a tidal wave of visuals and music, giving rise to a unique, artistic experience that reflects Reggio's vision of a brave new globalized world.
As the completion of the QATSI TRILOGY, NAQOYQATSI offers a cinematic concert to experience the allurement, seduction and sanctioned terror of ordinary daily living - a world at war beyond the battlefield, a conflagration between old and new nature - total war. The vision of NAQOYQATSI is a world made in the image and likeness of the new divine, the computer - a world where unity is held in the vice of technological homogenization, the globalized world of techno-fascism, the age of civilized violence.
Press on NAQOYQATSI coming soon.