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Update 1: A warning about tech delivered technologically: How Koyaanisqatsi attempts to alter perceptions
Released in 1982, the film Koyaanisqatsi was the antithesis to mainstream commercial filmmaking at the time. Yet it was presented by one of the scions of New Hollywood, Francis Ford Coppolla, and featured beautiful, groundbreaking cinematagrophy alongside a full orchestra score that immediatley stood out as one of the best film scores ever made. Yet agian, the film featured no actors, no dialogue, and no discernible plot, in the traditional sense.
What was the director, Godfrey Reggio, thinking? Was he being purposfully anti-commercial? On the contrary; Reggio wanted (but never dreamed that) a large number of people to see the film, so that he could get a message through to them that the modern media landscape would not allow. Reggios says of his film:
What you give up [with this film] is the specificty of one thought, one idea, unmistakably getting your point across, which people can agree or disagree with. But what you do get is the richness of an experience that can stay in the conscious and the unconscious mind and be continually revisted and serve as a source of inspiration for the viewer.
Koyaanisqatsi, then, is a radical, transpositional trojan horse, presenting itself as a film, and utilizing all the genre trappings thereof, to present the viewers instead with a shocking experience that attempts to reposition their positionality to the quotidian. It leads viewers to ask the five key questions relevant to meaning patterns, in an attempt to get them to reconsider the underpinnings of daily life in the technological age. Unlike a traditional film, which goes to great lengths to supply answers to the five key questions, Koyaanisqatsi forces the viewer to ask and answer these questions themselves.
All perspectives are infinite (as far as we know) and thus interpretations of any piece will also be infinite. This is even more so the case for an open ended piece like Koyaanisqatsi. When I attempt to answer the questions of transpositionality, this is what I get, but others very well may get different answers, obviously:
Reference – What is this about?
The film is about technological disruption to human life and nature.
Agency – Who or what is doing this?
Humanity has adopted technology to the point that technology has become akin to a living force in and of itself, consuming the human impulse and spitting it back out as a preverted form of itself.
Structure – What holds this together?
The film utilizes a "feature film" structure, with a beginning, middle, and end, with a score, and with thematic editing. However, the "meanings" are intentionally diffuse and hard to comprehend, and as such, the structure also very much relies upon the viewer to achieve.
Context – What else is this connected to?
The context of the film is several fold: first, you know you are a viewer in a theater (or at home, or some other location) watching a feature film. Second, you variously know you are seeing images of: nature, cities, humans, technology (including rocketships, cars, buildings, circuit grids, manufacuring processes, etc.).
Given your relationship to these images, most will be very familiar, but presented in an unfamiliar way (sped up, slowed down, overlaid with other images or cut next to images that make you reconsider their traditional context).
Interest – What’s this for?
The film is presented as a "documentary," but -- especially at the time of its realease -- was very much unlike any other mainstream documentary ever released widely.
Thus, the film aimed, in some ways, to "trick" an audience into seeing it by offering them an experience they thought they knew (a documentary about nature and/or modern life) presented in such a way that it confounded expectations and forced the viewer to reexamine their interest in the material (some were put off, some were pleasantly surprised in a way that made them re-examine their life).
