As a trilogy the Qatsi's offer an interestingly framed perspective of mankind. Koyaanisqatsi in particular interests me. The juxtaposition of the natural world with the "artificial" is fascinating and from a purely aesthetic perspective, its preservation by the US National Film Registry is a no-brainer.
In a video filmed as a "Making of" for Koyaanisqatsi, Reggio maintains that the Qatsi films are meant to create an experience and that "it is up [to] the viewer to take for himself/herself what it is that [the film] means." But the statements that he makes in the interviews (that we watched as a class), it is hard to believe that this is true. He is rather aggressive in condemning technology, and constantly compares it to art. His comments honestly suggest ignorance in his understanding of both art and technology.
I feel that he misses that technology is part of being human, since he is so quick to condem its ubiquitous nature. Parsing the word "technology" we see that it simply means the study of art, skill, or craft. This and culture is all that really set us apart from the rest mammals. He dreams of a post-technology future, but that is utterly ridiculous. Viewing human history through the lens of "Guns, Germs, and Steel", technology is the sole reason that culture has been able to move from a virtual afterthought to one of the centers of human establishment. Advances in food production freed up individuals pursue endeavors outside of securing nourishment. It was this surplus from which cultural specialists like religious leaders, thinkers, scientistes, etc. sprung from. So from simply examining the mechanisms by which human society evolved, the idea of a world without this support system seems unfeasible. No, I have no wish to be a hunter-gatherer, and I do not think many other people in our society (First World) wish to be so either. Technology is requisite for our survival as a species, since we are lacking in many other areas with respect to other living organisms.
He says that technology has a life of its own, but I would make the case that it is more like a virus than a living organism, but even that is a stretch. The root of the problem for me is not technology, but the creator itself.
We have created technology to make our lives easier (i.e. get tasks done more efficiently). Why have we done so?
Probably because we exist in a finite state. We have a finite amount of time and finite amount of energy, ergo as a self preserving system, we (as individuals and living systems) usually choose the
"easiest" path. We evolved the computing power beyond many other organism to perform calculations to optimize our actions under the conditions of our terminal existence. To me, technology is an the product of our execution of this programming. This fortified by the mentality with which we continue to develop technology to be more efficient on many fronts.
We seem to be programmed to be unsatisfied with past improvements and live on a relative scale. Life in third-world countries is likely better than life of humans tens of thousands of years ago, yet today this is the bottom of the scale.
At any rate, Reggio sets the stage for introspective activities such as these. Despite maintaining that the film is essentially neutral, it is clear that he selects the images that he does for his film to instigate specific feelings within ourselves (the viewers). He succeeds in invoking the thought that we humans are a cancerous mass in the supra-organism, an mass that is unsustainably, evolving and replicating for the sake of existing. He succeeds in making me question the purpose of our existence as a race, but his apparent motivations for making the films simply do not jive with my perception of the world.
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