Near the very end, Koyaanisqatsi shows you a dictionary entry. For the whole film nobody speaks, there’s no narrator and no caption telling you where you are, and then the word a bass voice chanted over the opening finally gets spelled out for you, ko.yaa.nis.qatsi, from the Hopi language, a noun, with five meanings stacked under it. Crazy life. Life in turmoil. Life out of balance. Life disintegrating. A state of life that calls for another way of living.
Most people meet the word that way, through Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 film with Philip Glass’s score and Ron Fricke’s camera, and most of what’s written on koyaanisqatsi meaning stops at the third of those five. The Hopi dictionaries say more: the word describes the way of life of a whole people gone wrong, and Reggio asked Hopi elders before he put it on his film.
What does koyaanisqatsi mean?
Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word. The Hopi live in twelve villages on and around three mesas in northeastern Arizona, and the word is built from two pieces of their language. Qatsi means life. Koyaanis- is a bound form, a piece that can’t stand on its own, and the Hopi dictionaries gloss it as corrupted or chaotic.
The Hopi dictionaries also say who the word is about. A Concise Hopi and English Lexicon (1985) gives koyaanisqatsi as corrupted life, “re group,” and the Hopi Dictionary of 1998, made with Hopi speakers of the Third Mesa dialect, defines it as “life of moral corruption and turmoil” and again says it of a group. So the word is about people together, a group whose way of living has gone wrong.
The film’s end card keeps that weight in its fifth line, a state of life that calls for another way of living, which puts the trouble in how people live.
Where Godfrey Reggio found the word
Reggio didn’t want a word for a title. He’d spent fourteen years, from fourteen to twenty-eight, as a Christian Brother in a Catholic teaching order, then worked in Santa Fe with street gangs and with the ACLU against what the film scholar Scott MacDonald describes as “the use of technology to control behavior.” For his first film he wanted a picture where the title would go, the famous LIFE photograph of an audience in 3D glasses all staring at a screen you can’t see. Everyone told him he couldn’t do that, so he went looking for, in his words, “a word that had no baggage culturally.”
He already knew David Monongye, a spokesman of the Hopi village of Hotevilla, whom he’d met by giving him a ride from the reservation to a doctor’s appointment. Reggio remembers what Monongye told him: “everything that you call normal we call a bad normal, everything that you call real, we call unreal, everything sane is insane.” The word itself came through the linguist Ekkehart Malotki and his Hopi co-worker Michael Lomatuway’ma, the two men the film credits with the linguistic research on its title, and both of them went on to help make the 1998 Hopi Dictionary.
Then Reggio took the word back to Monongye. “David said it’s an ancient word,” he told the historian Montserrat Madariaga in 2018, “a word that’s not in popular use. He didn’t talk much about it, but he said the definition we had, took the meaning of the word.” Two more checks followed, with Mina Lansa, the traditional leader of Old Oraibi, and her husband John, then with a group from Second Mesa, and Reggio says all of them gave their consent. When the film was finished he showed it at the cultural center on the reservation and rented buses to bring Hopi people to the Santa Fe screening, which Monongye introduced. The end credits name Monongye among the film’s inspirations, beside Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Guy Debord and Leopold Kohr.
Koyaanisqatsi, the film: no words, one score
Reggio and Fricke made it between 1975 and 1982, and by the Los Angeles Times’ count in 1983 that meant three years of filming in fourteen states and four more of editing, paid for through Reggio’s Institute for Regional Education with about $2.5 million from seventy donors. It premiered at Telluride in September 1982, and in 2000 the Library of Congress put it in the National Film Registry.
It opens and closes on the Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon, Utah, life-sized painted figures in the style archaeologists call Barrier Canyon. In 2014 a Utah State team dated them to between one and two thousand years ago, the centuries when farming was first reaching the canyon country. Between those two looks at them the film goes from desert and cloud to mines and power lines, freeways and war machines, the towers of Pruitt-Igoe coming down in St. Louis, cities at night, faces in the street, and a rocket that climbs, explodes and falls back in burning pieces.
Philip Glass wrote his score watching short sections of the film on videocassette. The Philip Glass Ensemble plays under Michael Riesman, the choir is the Western Wind, and the voice chanting the title is the bass Albert de Ruiter. Reggio talks about the score as “13 discrete parts that feel like parts of the body,” and the complete soundtrack Glass’s label put out in 2009 has thirteen tracks, just over 76 minutes. Lay them end to end at their real lengths and the whole shape of the film shows up. The land, then what gets taken out of it, then machines and cities, then The Grid, which is eighteen minutes long after a three-and-a-half-minute introduction, the longest piece in the score and the place where the music and the pictures run fastest.
How Ron Fricke filmed the time-lapse
Fricke had shot Reggio’s television spots for the ACLU campaign, and the two of them found time-lapse, by their account, in “some low-visibility commercial work” and decided it was “the language [they] were missing.” Fricke bought a Mitchell camera and built a motor with an intervalometer to move it between frames, powered by a gel-cell battery that lasted twelve hours. The production notes describe his rig for programming camera speeds, tilts and pans as made from “Radio Shack parts and electric car window motors,” with a 16mm zoom lens fitted to a 35mm camera. Some of the New York street time-lapse came from Hilary Harris, including footage from his 1975 short Organism.
Most of Fricke’s time-lapse was shot at 1½ frames a second. The Los Angeles freeway shot was made from the top of a building with ten seconds between frames, twelve hours of daytime, and then the film was rewound and twenty minutes of night were shot over it on the same frames.
A projector runs 24 frames a second, so the arithmetic is simple. Shoot at 24 and the city moves at its own speed. Shoot at 1½ and play it back at 24 and everything moves sixteen times faster. Shoot one frame every ten seconds and you’ve multiplied by 240, so one second on screen is four minutes on that freeway, and a twelve-hour day goes by in three minutes.
Push it all the way and nothing in the picture breaks. Every car is going somewhere, every window is somebody’s kitchen, and at 240 times the cars are gone and what’s left is the traffic, a river of light that nobody inside it can see. Everything works, and nothing is right.
Fricke himself kept a little distance from the film he shot. “I always felt that Koyaanisqatsi should have been filmed in 70mm,” he told American Cinematographer in 1993, when his own Baraka came out, “and I did not completely agree with its message.”
The Hopi prophecies in Koyaanisqatsi
Near the end, over faces in the street, the choir sings, and the film holds the translation back until after the five meanings. Then it gives you three lines:
- “If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.”
- “Near the Day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky.”
- “A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans.”
Those lines reached the outside world at a specific moment in Hopi history. In the years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a group of Hopi at Second Mesa began, in the anthropologist Brian Haley’s words, “equating the atomic bomb with a prophetic story about a gourd of ashes which brought destruction when it was cast on the ground.” By 1948 elders and religious leaders of the Second and Third Mesas had decided the prophecies had to be shared with people outside, and in 1949 they wrote to President Truman about prophecy, about who owned their land and about permits to take minerals from it. Thomas Banyacya spent his life carrying that message as one of its spokesmen.
Dan Katchongva, a Sun Clan leader of Hotevilla who died in 1972, gave his teachings in a booklet, From the Beginning of Life to the Day of Purification, translated through his interpreter Danaqyumptewa and edited by Thomas Francis Tarbet, on the condition that it never be sold. The film’s special thanks list Katchongva, and its credits list Hopi prophecy consultants, among them Tarbet, Malotki and Lomatuway’ma. Some theaters handed out a black and red pamphlet with the translations in it.
Life out of balance in five paintings by Thomas Cole
Almost a century and a half before Fricke, Thomas Cole did a time-lapse with a brush. The Course of Empire is five paintings he made between 1834 and 1836 for the New York collector Luman Reed, and all five belong to the New-York Historical Society. His idea, in a letter, was that “a series of pictures might be painted that should illustrate the History of a natural scene,” showing “the natural changes of Landscape & those effected by man in his progress from Barbarism to Civilization.”
It’s the same valley in every picture, and Cole marked it with a rock on top of a crag so you’d always know where you are. The light moves too. The first picture is a sunrise after a stormy night, the fourth is a city burning under a tempest, and the last one opens on the sun just gone down and the moon coming up over the sea near where the sun rose in the first. Watch them in order and the shape is close to the film’s, land, then use, then a city at its height, then fire, then quiet.
The last of the five, Desolation, is the stillness after: ivy on the columns, a heron nesting on top of a lone column, and the rock on the crag exactly where it was. Cole’s own words for it are that the promontory “still rears against the sky unmoved, unchanged.”
Tetra’s APOCALYPSE, For They Say That Hell Is On Earth is built from the same material Reggio cut together: a grid of screens holding cloud, open ocean, the curve of the earth, fire and a mushroom cloud, the weather and the weapons side by side. In the middle, out of focus, one blue head in profile takes it all in, the faces in the street reduced to a single witness who cannot look away.
Frequently asked questions
What does koyaanisqatsi mean in English?
It’s Hopi, from koyaanis-, corrupted or chaotic, and qatsi, life. Hopi dictionaries give it as a corrupted life, a life of moral corruption and turmoil, and they say it of the life of a group. The 1982 film offers five renderings: crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, and a state of life that calls for another way of living. “Life out of balance” is the one that stuck.
How do you pronounce koyaanisqatsi?
koh-YAH-nis-KAHT-see, with the weight on YAH and KAHT. The Hopi q is a k made further back in the throat, and the double aa is a long vowel.
What do Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi mean?
They’re the other two films in Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy, and like the first, each defines its title only at the end. Powaqqatsi (1988) uses the Hopi word for a sorcerer, powaqa, and the film defines it as “an entity, a way of life, that consumes the life forces of other beings in order to further its own life.” Naqoyqatsi (2002) gives three: “a life of killing each other,” “war as a way of life,” and, marked as an interpretation, “civilized violence.”
What music is in Koyaanisqatsi?
The whole score is by Philip Glass, played by the Philip Glass Ensemble under Michael Riesman with the Western Wind singing and Albert de Ruiter as the bass voice. The first album in the 1980s was cut down to six tracks and 45 minutes. The 2009 Complete Original Soundtrack on Orange Mountain Music has all thirteen tracks and the film’s sound effects, over 76 minutes.
Read next
- Color in film, the hub for this series and how cinema turns light into feeling.
- The Star Gate in 2001, another camera that bent time, one frame a minute.
- The sublime in art: John Martin, Cole’s contemporary, painting the end of cities.
References
- Montserrat Madariaga, “Of How a Hopi Ancient Word Became a Famous Experimental Film,” Not Even Past, University of Texas at Austin, May 15, 2018, drawing on her interviews with Godfrey Reggio: notevenpast.org
- Steve Marsh, “Life Out of Balance,” an interview with Godfrey Reggio, The Great Northern: web.archive.org
- Scott MacDonald, “The Qatsi Trilogy: Celebration and Warning,” The Criterion Collection, December 11, 2012: criterion.com
- AFI Catalog of Feature Films, Koyaanisqatsi, history notes and end titles: catalog.afi.com
- Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi, film credits: philipglass.com; Complete Original Soundtrack (Orange Mountain Music, 2009): philipglass.com
- Hopi Dictionary Project, Hopi Dictionary / Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni, University of Arizona Press, 1998, and Roy Albert and David Leedom Shaul, A Concise Hopi and English Lexicon, John Benjamins, 1985.
- Richard Gold, on the making of Koyaanisqatsi, American Cinematographer, 1984; “Baraka: A World Beyond Words,” American Cinematographer, November 1993: theasc.com
- National Park Service, Horseshoe Canyon and the Great Gallery: nps.gov; Utah State University on the dating of Barrier Canyon style rock art, 2014: usu.edu
- Dan Katchongva, From the Beginning of Life to the Day of Purification, edited by Thomas Francis Tarbet, first published 1972.
- Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire, New-York Historical Society; Cole’s letter and the series: explorethomascole.org; Cole’s description of the five pictures, The Knickerbocker 8 (1836).
- Library of Congress, National Film Registry selections, 2000: loc.gov