Powaqqatsi, 20 Years Later

The highway as graveyard, a static perversion of progress and industrial speed.

Godfrey Reggio's 1988 film Powaqqatsi is more than just the second installment in his trilogy of dreamy, technological critiques. It's a rare overlap of the experimental and the popular, a commercially successful portrait of Third World poverty with a rocking soundtrack and zero words.

Deliberately paced, impressionistic, nonlinear, it's not the kind of film that endears itself easily to mainstream audiences. It has not plot. No dialogue. No narration. Roger Ebert called it a "feature length New Age music video" back when it came out; Siskel wasn't much kinder. Its sumptuous if bleak vision of Third World life can be hard to take. The title is a Hopi term for "life in transformation," benign enough until you look at the roots: "Powaqa" is negative sorcerer; "Qatsi" is life. Translated another way it means "parasitic way of life." Definitely not the feel-good flick of the summer.

The film's strongest "pop" element, however, comes from Philip Glass' hypnotic, pulsating score. I recently saw Powaqqatsi in an ideal environment: outdoors in Brooklyn at the Prospect Park bandshell, accompanied by the Philip Glass Ensemble. In that setting the score is more than just arty sonics: its essential bombastic nature is revealed, auditory fireworks that dazzle the park goers sprawled on blankets, nursing their Bud Lights. It's pop music through and through, as spectacular and panethnic and traditionally beautiful as our neighborhood, Park Slope.

Odd to think that Glass' experimental days were behind him at this point. Gone are the dense, hi-speed arpeggios of 1971's Music With Changing Parts and 1976's Einstein On The Beach. He retired those bliss-out masterworks for kinder, gentler, more commercial prospects such as George Lucas-funded films like Powaqqatsi. The film score reassures the audience and compliments the film, never daring to plunge head-first into the Farfisa vortex that drove so many critics and record buyers insane. (When I saw Glass in 1997 at the University of Florida, a well-dressed, older gentleman stormed the stage screaming, "This is NOT music! Get your money back!" Poor guy didn't even know he was 20 years late to the game. Fortunately, Glass just ignored him and kept on playing.)

Powaqqatsi survives, but it represents an end of experimentation more than anything else. It's a bittersweet cocktail that reminds me of what it should have been, daring and blazing, an indictment of First World interests, rather than the National Geographic travelogue it actually is. Fortunately, it holds up better than Reggio's other work in that it asks some interesting questions, silently, suggesting that the life in transformation—the parasitic way of life—may be our own.

Comments

[north guinea hills]

Ha! I remember that heckler at that Glass show in G-ville. I thought it he was a plant, or a joke. Truth be told, the music was better then anticipated. And, you all know my views on early Glass....

[larazing]

i've just discovered this web
heaps of amazing stuff
don't tell me it's over!

[Aparna]

I saw this video from youtube. This is really amazing.