it just occured to me that Koyaanisqatsi came out 25 years ago. hard to believe. [ Then i found out it's actually 26 years old . Whatever... ]. Made an enormous life-changing impact on me at the time it came out: I saw it maybe 5 times the first week. I can't think of another movie that ever moved me so much.
Got to see the others in the trilogy last year: nowhere near as powerful, for me. Ditto "Baraka".
anyone else had their world turned upside down by Koyaanisqatsi?
Nice visuals for a stoner
Otherwise, it was just another version of the hippie "the world is dying" message
And Phillip Glass' music gets pretty tiresome after a while
Maybe the most radical thing about it was that such an experimental film was released to a general audience. There were hardly any commercial venues for independent films in the early 80s. Today you see its influences everywhere, especially in advertising.
I remember seeing it in Manhattan with my father's mother, an intellectual I did not know most of my childhood. She insisted I was the one who wanted to see it, even though I'd never heard of it. The escalators at Grand Central always looked a little different afterward.