Naqoyqatsi, playing at Cornell Cinema
I’ve been waiting to see this, having missed the NYC premiere.
Naqoyqatsi, Hopi for “war as a way of life”, concludes Godfrey Reggio’s meditative trilogy on the plight of nature in a world gone rather mad with industrial greed.
hybrid (piece I made for the Miramax site)
Following a kaleidoscopic logic, the film shatters the world of moving images and rearranges them on the screen according to a secret geometry. Tropical fish swim in coral reefs; rockets cut the sky; an angry crowd runs amok through the streets; digital effects enact contradiction across the Earth’s broken landscape. Philip Glass (with assistance from Yo-Yo Ma) adds a beautifully integrated score that provides the pulse to Reggio’s free association montage. “Reggio has a particular talent for collecting footage from the visual fringe, such as industrial videos and MRI scans, and then distorting them in ways that makes them beautiful and ominous. The movie works best at its less didactic moments; it’s not the A-bomb cloud that will haunt your dreams but the crash-test dummies in a bucking airplane, moving in slow motion with near-human grace.” (The New Yorker)
2002, color, 1 hour 29 minutes, USA
Wednesday, February 5, 10:00 WSH
Friday, February 7, midnight URIS
Saturday, February 8, 7:30 URIS