A thousand-year-old petroglyph watches in silence. Then, the horizon splits open. A Saturn V rocket, the phallic totem of our technological age, ascends toward the sky on a column of fire and fury, its violence rendered lyrical by a slow motion sequence that transfigures its nature. This is not the beginning of a story, but the evocation of a founding myth in reverse. It is the opening of Koyaanisqatsi, and Godfrey Reggio is not inviting us to a vision, but to a liturgy. A cinematic ritual that, like any self-respecting ritual, bypasses the logos to speak directly to the nervous system, to the subconscious, to that part of us that recognizes patterns before we can even name them.

Shot over a period of almost seven years and assembled with the patience of a monk amanuensis, Reggio's film is a work that proudly stands outside any category. It is not a documentary, as it lacks didacticism and narration. It is not fiction, yet it constructs a world more powerfully than a thousand screenplays. It is, perhaps, the cinematic equivalent of a symphonic poem, or better still, a pagan oratorio for the 20th century. If cinema is, as Jean Epstein claimed, a machine for thinking, Koyaanisqatsi is a machine for feeling, for perceiving the disconnect between the geological time of the planet and the paroxysmal time of our civilization.

Its language is that of pure dialectical montage, a legacy that goes back directly to the masters of Soviet cinema. But where Eisenstein used the collision of images to forge a precise political and intellectual meaning, Reggio uses it to generate a state of trance, an aesthetic and spiritual epiphany. The film resurrects the ghost of Dziga Vertov's “Kino-Eye,” updating his Soviet urban ecstasy into a late-capitalist requiem. Ron Fricke's camera does not merely observe; it breathes. It glides over the rock formations of Monument Valley with the solemn slowness of a geological entity, captures the dance of clouds in time-lapse, transforming them into celestial rivers, and then, with a brutal cut, throws us into the pulsating, mechanical heart of our creation.

The first half of the work is a contemplation of the natural world that has the sublime tranquility of romantic landscape painters, from Caspar David Friedrich to the painters of the Hudson River School. It is a world of pure forms, slow rhythms, and a majesty that does not need man to make sense. But then the contagion begins. A shadow lengthens, a mining explosion tears the earth apart. Power lines appear, artificial veins innervating the landscape, followed by heavy machinery moving like prehistoric insects in an industrial ballet of terrible and sinister beauty. It is here that the film reveals its kinship with Futurist aesthetics, but reverses its sign. If Marinetti celebrated the “beauty of speed” and the “world enriched with a new beauty,” Reggio and Fricke show its cost, its devouring efficiency. The car is no longer a symbol of freedom, but a rogue cell in a congested bloodstream, whose perpetual motion in time-lapse becomes the very image of stasis, of non-movement.

And then there is the music. To talk about Koyaanisqatsi without elevating Philip Glass's score to the rank of co-author would be an unforgivable critical error. His minimalist music, with its hypnotic arpeggios and relentless harmonic progressions, is not a commentary or a background. It is the voice of the film, its rhythmic engine, its circulatory system. The choir that sings the title at intervals—“Ko-yaa-nis-qatsi”—is not simply enunciating a name; it is intoning a mantra, a diagnosis, a prophecy. Glass’s music acts as a perceptual accelerator, welding disparate images into a single, unstoppable stream of visual consciousness. Without it, Fricke's images would have been a gallery of spectacular photographs; with it, they become a living organism, a kinetic Golem.

The heart of the film is its urban section, a descent into the human anthill that dwarfs any previous metropolitan symphony. People, reduced to colorful swarms on escalators, to indistinct streams passing through stations, are no longer composed of individuals. They are a mass, a super-organism governed by invisible laws, like particles in an accelerator. The most fitting analogy is perhaps not in cinema, but in the literature of the Beat Generation. Koyaanisqatsi is Allen Ginsberg's Howl translated into images: a rhythmic and torrential lament against a civilization that sacrifices the soul on the altar of Moloch, whose face here is that of mass production, consumption for its own sake, architecture that isolates and oppresses. The sequence of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis—a real event that marked “the death of modern architecture” for architect Charles Jencks—becomes in the film a powerful symbol of the failure of the utopian-rationalist dream, an admission of guilt in the form of a controlled explosion.

And what about the year of release, 1982? A crucial year. The same year Ridley Scott brought Blade Runner to the screen. Both films, albeit with diametrically opposed languages, are the offspring of the same anxiety, the same perception of a future that is already here and that is profoundly inhuman. While Scott imagines a rainy, noir Los Angeles to recount the identity crisis in the era of artificial reproduction, Reggio abstracts the concept, showing us the very matrix of that world: printed circuits that flow like endless highways, information traveling at the speed of light, reducing human experience to a stream of data. It is a prophetic intuition that anticipates our current digital existence by decades. As in a Philip K. Dick novel, reality dissolves into a simulacrum, but here the simulacrum is not an android, it is the entire system of life we have built.

There is, however, a profound and fascinating meta-textual irony in Koyaanisqatsi. The film uses the most sophisticated tools of film technology (high-speed cameras, special lenses, elaborate post-production techniques) to question the trajectory of that very technology. It is not a Luddite pamphlet, but an internal critique, a complex reflection that arises from the heart of the machine to look at the machine itself. It is a work that demonstrates how technology, when guided by an artistic and philosophical vision, can transcend its instrumental nature to become a vehicle of awareness.

The ending, with the return of the rocket exploding in a ball of fire and falling towards the earth in poignant slow motion, closes the circle. The rise and fall. Hubris and nemesis. The silence of the petroglyph that has been watching us since the beginning of time remains impassive. There is no explicit judgment, only the presentation of facts, edited according to an inevitable poetic logic. Koyaanisqatsi offers no solutions; its function is that of a seismograph of the soul. It records the tremors, the fractures, the “life out of balance” suggested by the Hopi title. It is not a film to be “watched,” but an experience to be absorbed, a pure distillation of cinema that forces us to see our world as if we were seeing it for the first time, through the impassive eyes of an alien entity or, perhaps, a forgotten god. And in this vision, there is a terrifying beauty, the same beauty that can be found in a supernova or in a perfect mathematical equation describing chaos. It is the sublime nature of our disaster.