Minimalist Music

[claris!netcom!wasilko@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Jeff Wasilko)]

A quick article about Phillip Glass' latest soundtrack (not really latest,
but some more minimalist trivia):


-------------------

                            THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
                       Copyright Times Mirror Company 1988
 
 DATE: SATURDAY  May 7, 1988
 EDITION: Home Edition                        LENGTH: MEDIUM
 PART-NAME: Calendar                          PAGE: 8
 PART-NUMBER: 6                               COLUMN: 1
 TYPE-OF-MATERIAL: Motion Picture Review
 DESK: Entertainment
 SOURCE: MICHAEL WILMINGTON
 
                                  MOVIE REVIEWS
                  'POWAQQATSI' OFFERS FEAST OF SIGHT AND SOUND
 
     Godfrey Reggio's ''Powaqqatsi'' (selected theaters), like his earlier
 ''Koyaanisqatsi,'' is a lyrical documentary that turns the instruments of
 technology against it. In some ways, the new film is less effective, but it's
 also more visually spectacular: a mesmerizing cascade of sensuous sights and
 sounds.
    Shot on several continents--in Peru, Brazil, Kenya, Egypt, Israel, Hong
 Kong, Nepal, India, West Germany and France--''Powaqqatsi'' creates its own
 global village, linking it all with the hypnotic repetitions of Philip Glass'
 score. And instead of ''Koyaanisqatsi's'' focus on geography and the
 mechanical, ''Powaqqatsi'' shows a new fascination with the human face
 --usually from the Third World, usually poor.
    These are people at work, people in transit, people cast off on the shoals
 of the cities, with faces alive and buoyant, or dead and shattered. Over and
 over, we see shots of water, of landscapes parched or exploding with heat. The
 thousands of faces seem drenched in light, blazing, joined together in a mass
 communion with the sun.
    One of the more powerful images in the film is a tiny boy walking along a
 highway, heat rising in waves and the crushing mass of a truck swallowing up
 the rest of the frame. Later we see a wrecked car on a highway divider and
 ghostly superimpositions of other cars racing by on either side. Both frames
 suggest a leading theme: the domination of man by his tools, the tyranny over
 humanity by its extensions.
     Koyaanisqatsi  is a Hopi word meaning ''life out of balance.''
 ''Powaqqatsi'' refers to a life lived at others' expense, a life of
 exploitation. The subject matter is less cosmic, more personal and elusive
 --and, as before, there's a paradox.
    Reggio attacks the excesss eof modern life by using one invention--the
 motion picture camera--which seems most typical of the new technology. And he
 consciously distorts many of his images, speeds them up, slows them down, uses
 time lapse photography and--especially in ''Powaqqatsi''--opticals and
 telescopic lenses.
    Majestic mesas tower up against scudding, racing clouds in
 ''Koyaanisqatsi,'' and in ''Powaqqatsi'' rapturously slowed bodies swim
 through lacquered-looking sunlight. With his new cameramen, aerial photography
 specialists Graham Berry and Leonidas Zourdoumis, Reggio creates the illusion
 of a godlike technological eye, watching over the eternal seas and hills, the
 mad hubbub of the cities.
    Glass' score, as before, knits together the images and gives them
 resonance. Here, the music is more complex and various, with an insistent
 percussion that suggests heavy metal mixed with a plangent stew of ethnic
 instruments, winds, strings and a children's chorus.
    Is ''Powaqqatsi'' (MPAA-rated: G) a matter of personal taste? Reggio's
 sensibility--mixing spirit and machine, meditation and pop, idealism and
 iconoclasm, the universal and the particular, the symbolic and the real--seems
 at times a kind of '60s revival. But, even so, Reggio and Glass offer
 something that most narrative movies or documentaries can't: a true feast for
 the eyes and ears.