Saturday, November 16, 2002

Koyaanisqatsi

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

I saw Koyaanisqatsi tonight at the American Museum of the Moving Imagine, in Queens. It's a documentary from 1983 on American life. No dialog, no plot. Scored by Philip Glass.

It was very powerful, but it seemed that the filmmaker wanted to instill in the audience the notion that humanity is small, fleeting. That no matter how we may try, there are forces greater than us that are beyond our control.

It backfired. It instilled in me an optimism. How far we've come and how far we still have to go. Our future is open-ended. Our technology may cause problems, but it also has the ability to solve them.

During the scene on cars, all I could think of was clean fuels. During the production-line scene at the car factory with the works, I could only think of nanotechnology's coming effect on manufacturing.

Koyaanisqatsi means "life out of balance." Which is certainly befitting the time in which we live - but it isn't necessarily a sentence passed down on humanity.

Maybe I'm naive.

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