KOYAANISQATSI

i watched the film again yesterday, curious where the scenes were that i remembered from my theater viewing, when it came out, as a child. i don't remember being as overwhelmed then as i was watching it yesterday. maybe as a child i could lose myself in it more thoroughly, though i can't imagine the vertigo & motion sickness of the fast-paced zooming sections would not have affected me. i got terrible motion sickness back then, as now, but these days there is the migraine factor. & there's the ongoing question of how my never-diagnosed autism has changed its expression over the course of my life. 

there's a question i asked all through the film yesterday that i don't have an answer for. is the film appropriative of the prophecies it abstracts from? is it appropriative in its very being? in the end credits there are many namings & acknowledgements of actual Hopi cultural advisors, & Hopi prophecy advisors, & i think, ok, good. who asked for this film to be made, though? i don't know that. i could try to find out. one of the inspiration-figures listed at the very end of the credits was Guy Debord. surprising.

the long sequence at the end follows the launch & explosion of what looks like one of the Saturn rockets involved in the Apollo missions. i have a family connection to those missions & their rockets. the sequence follows the tumbling, burning descent of one of the rocket cones & the engine element attached to it, against the blue of the sky, slowly zooming in on it to isolate it on the screen, then slowing the film so that it finally seems to hang in space. fade to pictographs on stone. 

as a child, i was transfixed by the tumbling wreckage sequence, but i don't recall what it meant to me. i remembered it as something slightly different--something more enclosed at the other end, like a brass spittoon falling through the sky. probably i was trying to give the object a form that made more sense, that was more whole. now i know that a thing or a body can be whole in its fragmentedness, or whole in its incompleteness. i didn't consciously understand the thing as broken, though i'd seen the footage of it breaking. but my brain wanted it to be something i recognized, so i made it that in my memory. 

we viewers are meant to find the fall terrible, the great overcrowding & destruction terrible, the violence of then-everyday life terrible. it is also beautiful. & it was strangely naive, too, back then. there were still domestic manufacturing jobs, auto industry assembly jobs. a single unhoused person was shown. traffic actually moved on the snaking intestinal freeways; lane changes were rare & done carefully. people looked like themselves, not like everyone else. 

as a child, i found the tumbling rocket cone both beautiful & comforting. alone, awkward, odd, it spun in space, a cipher on which others put meaning. i could relate to that.