Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of balance
I used to think that all words had one-to-one translations across all languages. Since then, I've fallen in love with a number of untranslatable words in other languages. The latest is "koyaanisqatsi", meaning "life out of balance" in the Hopi Native American language.
Koyaanisqatsi is also the name of a cult documentary film about the United States in the 70s and 80s. There is no dialogue, but the vibrant Philip Glass score makes it unnecessary. As the name suggests, the film conveys the sentiment that things are becoming too fast-paced and far too out of control.
The beginning is all footage of the natural world with a focus on the alien landscape of the Southwest. There is one defining moment where we see a shot of power lines framing the desert--a turning point in the film.
From there on, we visit major American cities to see their freeways, people going to work, drinking soda, playing video games in arcades. We watch airplanes land and space shuttles launch.
It's not surprising that the dark side of Koyaanisqatsi is subtle, just as it is in the definition of the word. LA lit up a night looks monstrous and eerie (a reaction I have every time I land at LAX). A baseball game from above becomes thousands of spectators suspended in time, watching a few lonely players with bated breath. Strangers on the street look at each other meaningfully and then turn away.
The dark side of mobility is sensory overload, the dark side of a Twinkie is mass consumerism, the dark side of over-communication is isolation. Even in 1982.
My favorite section of the film is a sequence in which Reggio set up cameras in busy places to film spontaneous self-portraits. Instead, people thought the cameras would take still portraits. They try to hold their pose for the camera, but their gaze seems to ask a question or suggest an expectation--they are waiting for something extraordinary to happen.
At the end, we find out that koyaanisqatsi means more than just life out of balance. It also means "a state of life that calls for another way of living". Again, untranslatable. So this is what my mom means when she complains of "too-many-button-things" or my dad, a decisive businessman, looks lost amidst twenty types of dishwashing liquid at the grocery store.
Our culture hasn't spawned the simple word yet, even though we have a million ways to describe it.
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