we're looking at a world that is intrinsically slow, that lives with the rhythms of nature, that is diversified, that is the opposite of the high kinetic energy of the industrial world. In
the intention was to create a mosaic, a monument, a frozen moment of the simultaneity of life as it existed in one instant around the Southern Hemisphere. We used slow motion, or very fast shooting, as the norm, and long lenses, not to romanticize the subject, but to monumentalize it so that we could look at it from a different point of view. In both
and
the intention was to see the ordinary from an extraordinary perspective. In the case of
we went out with a sense of style and form that motivated the kinds of equipment we got, the kinds of lenses that we took with us.
I think a lot of people were expecting
to be a
. I'm very pleased that the films do not repeat each other. Both
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are nonnarrative, but they have a different visual language.
was intrinsically exciting because of the spectacle that we've made out of the world.
is more like a long poem. I know there are problems with both filmsand I've learned from what I consider mistakesbut I feel very fortunate about both films. They have a life of their own.
Is it fair to say that the films reverse a set of traditions in commercial narrative films? Most movies focus on upper-middle-class individuals and their adventures, whereas
reveals how all these theoretically 'big' people are really little parts of a giant machine.
does the opposite: it's normal in American entertainment movies to depict third-world people as background or, at best, as sidekicks, but you make them the center of attention.
Exactly. The human being has more dignity in the South, because the South turns on the presence of human beings and their work. In
world, in the North, the human being is no longer the measure of life: we've been crushed into a synthetic environment that is no longer human. Even major characters of historyHitler, Stalin, Churchill, Rooseveltare unimportant. What is important is the nature of the massmass man. But in the South, which represents maybe two thirds of the planet's population, the human being is still the measure of life.
is framed by a long, continuous shot of a rocket taking off and then exploding and descending. Within that frame, there's a movement from rural to city with an increasingly frenetic pace until the final section where you slow down for several portraits of individual street people. One of the things that troubles me, and one of the things critics talked about, is that until you know that that rocket
going to fall and until we see the definition of 'koyaanisqatsi,' there's no way to know what the message of the city material is. It could provoke one to say, 'Oh, this is wildly frenetic anti-technology footage,'
to say, 'Isn't it incredible how well this all works!'
What I wanted to reveal was the beauty
the beast. People perceive this as beautiful
there's nothing else to perceive. If one lives in this world, in the industrialized city, all one can see is one layer of commodity piled upon another. There's no ability to see beyond, to see that we've encased ourselves in an artificial environment that has replaced nature. We don't live
nature any longer; we live above it; we look at it as
to keep this artificial environment going. I was trying to raise questions, and I worked on the premise that there must be an ambiguity built into the films if they're going to be art. Otherwise, they would become driving, didactic, propagandistic pieces. I look at the structure of each film in a 'trilectic' sense. There's the image, there's
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the music, and there's the viewer, each with a point of view, casting a particular shadow. It's impossible to totally eliminate the sense of didacticism, but I wanted to make the films as pliable and as amorphic as possible. I tried to take the things we see as our glories and turn them on a slight edge. In that sense I feel the film is successful.
As I got into
I started to see more films. This sounds very simplistic, but one of the obvious things I noticed was that in most films the foreground was where the plot and characterization took place, where the screenplay came in, and how you directed the photography. Everything was foreground; background (music included) basically supported characterization and plot. In my films I try to eradicate all the foreground of traditional film and make the background, or what's called 'second unit,' the foreground, give
the principal focus. I was trying to look at buildings, masses of people, transportation, industrialization as
