Koyaanisqatsi/ Powaqqatsi [DVD]

Description

Product Description "Koyaanisquatsi"Regisseur Godfrey Reggio kreierte mit Koyaanisqatsi ein faszinierendes Meisterwerk, das durch seine unverwechselbare Bildsprache und die Musik von Starkomponist Philip Glass ein Publikumsliebling wurde. Eine außergewöhnliche Dokumentation über den Eingriff des Menschen in die Natur - verpackt in ein einzigartiges Zusammenspiel von Bild und Ton."Powaqqatsi"In Powaqqatsi aus dem Jahre 1988 zeigt sich der Regisseur etwas weniger provokativ als zuvor in Koyaanisqatsi. Das minimalistisch-klassische Werk von Godfrey Reggio ist geprägt von Einflüssen aus traditioneller asiatischer und afrikanischer Musik wie auch durch elektronische Klänge von Starkomponist Philip Glass, was dem Betrachter einen stärkeren emotionalen Zugang zu den Bildern eröffnet. Als provozierender Kontrast dazu stehen Bilder des vermeintlichen Fortschritts der Zivilisation, der mit anonymen Städten das Ursprüngliche zu zerstören droht.Bonusmaterial:"Essence Of Life" Featurette With Director And Composer; "Impact Of Progress" Featurette With Director And Composer; Original Theatrical Trailers; From .co.uk Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi ("life out of balance") and Powaqqatsi ("life in transformation") are the first two parts of a trilogy of experimental documentaries whose titles derive from Hopi compound nouns (2002's Naqoyqatsi, or "life in war", is the third). Both feature indispensable musical contributions from minimalist composer Philip Glass. Made in 1983, Koyaanisqatsi was shot mostly in the desert southwest USA and New York City on a tiny budget with no script. But it then attracted the support of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas and reached a much wider audience. Its techniques, merging cinematographer Ron Fricke's time-lapse shots (alternately peripatetic and hyperspeed) with Glass' reiterative music (from the meditative to the orgiastic)--as well as its ecology minded imagery--crept into the consciousness of popular culture. The influence of Koyaanisqatsi has by now become unmistakable in television advertisements, music videos and, of course, similar movies. Dating from 1988, Powaqqatsi finds the director somewhat more directly polemical than before, with Glass's score stretching to embrace world music. Reggio reuses techniques familiar from the previous film (slow motion, time-lapse, superposition) to dramatise the effects of the so-called First World on the Third: displacement, pollution, alienation. But he spends as much time beautifully depicting what various cultures have lost--cooperative living, a sense of joy in labour and religious values--as he does confronting viewers with trains, airliners, coal cars and loneliness. What had been a more or less peaceful, slow-moving, spiritually fulfilling rural existence for these "silent" people (all we hear is music and sound effects) becomes a crowded, suffocating, accelerating industrial urban hell, from Peru to Pakistan. Reggio frames Powaqqatsi with a telling image: the Serra Pelada gold mines, where thousands of men, their clothes and skin imbued with the earth they're moving, carry wet bags up steep slopes in a Sisyphean effort to provide wealth for their employers. While Glass juxtaposes his strangely joyful music, which includes the voices of South American children, a number of these men carry one of their exhausted comrades out of the pit, his head back and arms outstretched--one more sacrifice to Caesar. Nevertheless, Reggio, a former member of the Christian Brothers, seems to maintain hope for renewal. --Robert Burns Neveldine