Koyaanisqatsi | Godfrey Reggio | Philip Glass

Times were different when Geoffrey Reggio’s Kooyanisqatsi came out in the cinema in 1983. The world was adamantly divided into East and West. People were critical, political and discovered their green conscience. They consumed drugs uninhibitedly – aids was still unheard of – enjoyed free sex. And then there was this film. It consisted of nothing, but contrapuntally assembled image sequences of untouched magnificent landscapes and civilisations surrounded by desert, underscored by a soundtrack by Philip Glass, written specifically for the film. The images, above all the aerial shots, were breathtakingly glorious and Glass' music powerfully suggestive. Together they combined to enthral.

Almost three – technically highly innovative – decades later, Kooyanisqatsi is viewed differently. As the precursor to its own genre of visually stunning, sometime more, sometimes less “experimental” documentary film, which evoke the beauty of the blue planet and simultaneously warns of its destruction: only the BBC series Planet Earth (2006/2007) together with Jacques Perrins Le peuple migrateur (2001) are excellent examples of this. It is true that Kooyanisqatsi seems a little old-fashioned today, when we discover unimaginable fantasy worlds in the cinema almost every day. Yet the film, for which three years were spent just synchronising music and image and giving the montage structure, has lost none of its suggestive power.