Koyaanisqatsi

Where did the USA take a wrong turn as an industrialized society? Accompanied by Philip Glass' iconic soundtrack, director Godfrey Reggio burns this question into the viewer's retina. With shots of nature at the beginning of the film, he creates a mirror image of the ridiculously dangerous industrialization of the USA. He shows a society that is desperately trying to create anthropologized mountains with skyscrapers as monuments to eternity - only to let them decay, blow them up and push people to the margins of society in the rubble.

In Reggio's ever faster spinning industrialized world, man in the totality of his actions becomes a logistically solvable problem. His work, his food, his transportation, his leisure time, his destruction - everything becomes logistical. For Reggio, the industrial dream of rockets, the conquest of space, the escape of the earth is necessarily linked to medium-range missiles, nuclear weapons and the destruction of this very earth and its nature. Industrialization turns animal life into sausage factories, individuals into human factories. And according to Reggio, Western society is doing this to itself, it is doing it to nature, until at some point it flies through the atmosphere, burnt out and lost, towards the impact.