Best Ever
Documentary Movie?

The first image is rock. Petroglyphs in Horseshoe Canyon, Utah—human figures and animals painted onto sandstone thousands of years ago, now revealed through slow zoom as the surface texture of something vast and indifferent. Philip Glass’s organ drones build underneath. A voice intones the title word, a Hopi term meaning “life out of balance” or “a state of life that calls for another way of living.” Then: fire. The Saturn V rocket that would carry astronauts to the moon, ascending in slow motion, its exhaust plume a technological sublime that makes the ancient paintings feel impossibly remote.

This is Koyaanisqatsi’s method: juxtaposition without commentary, images arranged to create meaning through collision rather than explanation. Godfrey Reggio, a former monk who’d spent years working with street gangs in New Mexico, conceived the film as a kind of visual prophecy—not arguing against technology or modernity but simply looking at them, holding the gaze long enough for the looking itself to become revelation.

The film proceeds through implicit movements. Desert landscapes give way to mining operations, strip-mined earth resembling the canyons that preceded it but wrong somehow, the patterns too regular. Power lines cross empty spaces. Then cities: first as structures, geometric and almost beautiful in time-lapse photography that renders construction as organic growth. Then as systems, traffic flowing through arteries, people moving through subway turnstiles with the same fluid mechanics as goods on assembly lines.

Ron Fricke’s cinematography—he would later direct Baraka and Samsara, extending Reggio’s technique into his own variations—finds the uncanny in the everyday through manipulation of time. Cloud shadows race across buildings. Crowds flow like water through Grand Central Terminal. Hot dogs process through a factory at speeds that render meat indistinguishable from mechanism. The time-lapse and slow-motion techniques weren’t new in 1982, but their sustained application across ninety minutes without narrative interruption was unprecedented.

Glass’s score doesn’t accompany the images; it drives them. The composer had been developing his repetitive, cyclical style through the operas Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha, but Koyaanisqatsi gave that style its most accessible showcase. The arpeggios that underpin “The Grid”—the film’s central sequence, depicting urban life at maximum velocity—have become shorthand for a certain kind of technological anxiety, referenced and parodied so often that it’s easy to forget how genuinely overwhelming they remain in context. The music doesn’t tell you how to feel; it creates the conditions for feeling.

Reggio has always resisted interpretation, insisting that the film asks questions rather than proposing answers. But the structure implies a thesis: that the acceleration of modern life has detached humanity from rhythms that sustained it for millennia, that our technologies have achieved a momentum of their own that no longer serves human flourishing. The Hopi prophecies quoted at the film’s end—warnings of a “container of ashes” that will fall from the sky, of the earth shaking and the seas turning black—were recorded before Hiroshima, before the Exxon Valdez. The film doesn’t claim these prophecies predict specific events; it suggests that the indigenous understanding of imbalance was always diagnostic rather than predictive.

The production history is its own testament to the film’s difficulty. Reggio began shooting in 1975; the film wasn’t completed until 1982, financed piecemeal through grants, investors, and eventually Francis Ford Coppola’s patronage. The premiere at Radio City Music Hall, with Glass performing the score live with his ensemble, was a cultural event—the New York Times covered it as news rather than criticism. The film would go on to influence everything from music videos to advertising, its techniques so thoroughly absorbed into visual culture that young viewers might not recognize what they’re seeing as innovation.

But the film resists assimilation. You can steal its shots, borrow its rhythms, reference its title as shorthand for any anxiety about modernity, and it still works—still builds its case through accumulation, still arrives at that final slow-motion shot of rocket debris falling through atmosphere, still chants its title word as the screen goes dark. Koyaanisqatsi invented a form and exhausted it simultaneously. The sequels Reggio made (Powaqqatsi, Naqoyqatsi) and the films others made in its wake are all variations on a theme stated here with finality.

Life out of balance. Another way of living. The film doesn’t tell you what that other way might be. It just makes you feel the imbalance in your body, through your eyes and ears, for ninety minutes. What you do with that feeling is your problem.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Criterion Blu-ray presents the film with a new 4K restoration supervised by Fricke, revealing details in both the landscape photography and the urban sequences.
• Glass’s score, available on multiple formats, rewards isolated listening—the cyclical structures that feel inevitable when paired with images reveal their compositional sophistication.
• The Qatsi Trilogy box set includes all three films in Reggio’s series. The sequels don’t match the original’s impact, but they extend its concerns into new territories.