“Minimalism and Meaning”
The Qatsi Trilogy consists of three films, all scored by Philip Glass: KOYAANISQATSI addresses the north, POWAQQATSI the south, and. NAQOYQATSI covers the global world. The films explore a straight line of time from the natural world to our more technological world, from slow to speeded up, from traditional to modern. It’s one thing to read about these changes, it’s another thing to feel the changes as if you were the Earth taking it all in. What is our relationship with technology? Is technology unquestioned a kind of a prison? Is it the new theology? Can we ever slow down now that we are speeded up? Have our concrete environments forevermore replaced our natural environments, or do we have the free will to someday hit the “reverse” button? Can our language still describe what we see each day, or has our language been made obsolete? Is there still a human center of gravity, or has that given way to a world where our physical bodies are no longer important, our physical involvement in the world diminished? These are disturbing questions! And these are disturbing films!! Through all of this is the music of Philip Glass. His minimalism, up to the time I saw these films, had always been interesting to compare with the very first Bach Prelude from the WTC Book One. After seeing these films, however, I realized that there were huge differences: Glass’s music was the cold, hypnotic and technological soundtrack of an irreversible modern world while Bach’s Prelude was calm, reflective, pastoral and meditative. I once had the privilege to talk to Philip Glass after his ensemble had performed live at a screening of Koyaanisqatsi. I sensed he had no desire to answer any of the questions I posed above; his gifts to us WERE those questions, and he wanted each of us to reflect on the world we had rapidly created. Many years later, I still am. I can’t stop at a red light without feeling, for an anxious split second, like a hamster on the wheel. And as I think about a smaller world (thanks to communications and transportation) becoming bigger (in population), I wonder about the possibility of immortality for myself, eg, if any of us can hope to be remembered as, say, Bach was when there were far fewer of us walking the Earth. Or is the din of noise too great to make a single life matter? The thing about experiencing these films with that music is…it starts to matter less how you rationalize or intellectualize the answers, and it starts to matter more how you feel them inside. And believe me, that can be a very scary place to visit. And once you visit, you can’t necessarily leave.
