Film: Koyaanisqatsi

Marx wrote:
“In changing nature, we change ourselves.”*

He was talking about the process of production, in which man exploits natural resources and human labour. In capitalist society the aggregate, global exploitation of labour and nature is at the most it's ever been, and the consequence of this is a life out of balance, with nature and with ourselves.

Koyaanisqatsi is an 87-minute visual illustration of this notion. It combines old and delicate nature and industrialised society as if to say, ‘there is a great need to redress this relationship. Look at what we’re doing to ourselves.’

It starts with footage of wilderness and natural cycles, cloud systems and stratified rock formations. These reminded me of a geological perspective of time - that our existence now is less than a speck in the whole of the universe’s existence.

This depiction is then followed by footage about production in a globalized, capitalist world. There’s footage taken in food, garment and vehicle factories, monocultures of flowers and views over the tower blocks in Manhatten. It seamlessly weaves together extremities to create a narrative where the common denominator is always Mankind, and where every shot further illustrates our lives out of balance. The pace is important and is always increasing; only slowing up over the wildernesses.

Made in 1983, the film describes Man’s relationship with Nature during Thatcher-Reagan Conservatism and before climate change became part of Western politics. The film doesn’t show any ice caps melting but focuses on the extremes of the society and cycles we’ve built for ourselves. The film takes the audience on a journey to a destructive, catastrophic end. It is a serious, dialectical film, not a cautionary tale. It is about symbiosis and balance and it has all been brought together to make a perfect object - self-contained, technically brilliant, evocative, compelling and visually dazzling.

I liked it very much.

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* "Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature." Chapter 7, Capital Vol.1, Marx, 1867