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{"id":2373,"date":"2006-02-24T17:43:00","date_gmt":"2006-02-24T17:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/koyaanisqatsi-the-concert-experience\/"},"modified":"2006-02-24T17:43:00","modified_gmt":"2006-02-24T17:43:00","slug":"koyaanisqatsi-the-concert-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2006\/02\/koyaanisqatsi-the-concert-experience.html","title":{"rendered":"Koyaanisqatsi — the concert experience!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"\"$ <\/a>
Ah, bliss. Last night, my brother and sister and a few friends and I went to the Queen Elizabeth Theatre to see Koyaanisqatsi<\/a><\/i> (1983), one of my five official favorite films of all time, with live musical accompaniment by the Philip Glass Ensemble<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

It had been several years since the last time I saw this film on the big screen, and I had never, ever attended one of Philip Glass\u2019s concerts before, so the whole experience was a real treat.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/a>I was intrigued, though, to see how the performance by the nine-member ensemble differed from the film\u2019s officially recorded soundtrack, which of course has a fuller, richer sound and is more consistently in sync with the images on screen. And I was also intrigued to see how my instincts compelled me to watch the musicians occasionally, to see how their work had been distributed across their instruments, even as I kept my eyes on the movie screen and its mezmerizing images most of the time.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/a>My brother, who claims he has almost memorized the film, remarked afterwards that he saw images last night that he didn\u2019t remember seeing on his DVD, and I replied that I had had the same experience too \u2014 except the images that seemed new to him were not<\/i> the same images that seemed new to me. Truly, this movie is a different experience every time you watch it.<\/p>\n

It was especially good to see the entire film in one sitting again, since for the last few years I have usually watched just a few minutes here or a few minutes there, often while looking for clips to show to friends or to play at speaking engagements.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/a>And FWIW, one thing that really hit me this time, perhaps more than before, is how in love the movie is with technology, even as it offers up its thoughtful, reflective, self-aware critique of our mechanized, tech-driven society. I mean, it\u2019s impossible for any<\/i> movie to be truly anti-technology, since film is a profoundly technological artform \u2014 especially when the film in question relies as strongly on time-lapse and slow-motion photography as this one does. But beyond that, I see a real poetry in some of the mechanized images \u2014 just as I heard a real beauty in some of the electronically reproduced voices coming from the Ensemble.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/a>Can\u2019t say I\u2019d ever want to be the factory worker whose entire job consists of moving Twinkies from one conveyor belt to another, though. I like machines, but they aren\u2019t quite that<\/i> fascinating!<\/p>\n

FWIW, one of my friends also made the interesting remark that, on one level, this film critiques the way that we have all been distanced from one another by our modern mechanistic culture, yet he didn\u2019t get the feeling that the audience at last night\u2019s show was truly \u201cbrought together\u201d by the experience; if anything, he thought there was just enough of an art-snob mentality there that kept people separate and distanced from one another. But that, I think, is simply reflective of the way large societies operate, and goes back much earlier than, say, the scientific revolution.<\/p>\n

And of course, the film does not exempt its own viewers from whatever critique it makes. Note the shot of a movie audience \u2014 in a balcony, just like we last night were in a balcony! \u2014 in the montage depicting the craziness of modern society. That\u2019s us!<\/p>\n

One final trivia note: The Pruitt-Igoe housing projects<\/a> that are destroyed at the beginning of the demolished-building sequence were designed by Minoru Yamasaki<\/a>, the same modernist architect who designed the World Trade Centre. Yamasaki apparently designed his buildings in the belief that better architecture would produce better people, and as I understand it, the squalour of the Pruitt-Igoe neighbourhood and the eventual demolition of those buildings in 1972 were taken as a sign that Yamasaki\u2019s vision had failed, at least in that instance. Make of that what you will.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"