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Mega/City/Crime: Notes on the Cultural Significance of Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

2018; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s11196-018-9581-x

1572-8722

Ronnie Lippens,

Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance

In his “non-narrative” film Koyaanisqatsi (Hopi for ‘life in imbalance’) Godfrey Reggio documents the ecologically disastrous ‘imbalanced’ life in modern, industrialised mega-cities. In the film, he seems to mourn the loss of what he suggests was a more ‘balanced’ form of life, when Man was one with nature. This contribution draws on elements in Hopi culture and reads Reggio’s iconic film as part of a cultural trend in which submission, in all its guises, is no longer accepted. In this cultural trend submission always is submission to code (that is: to a certain structured solidity or ordered coherence), and therefore, to wasteful destruction and to ‘life in imbalance’. This trend has, however, in the course of the decades, also spawned a void of “Luciferian” desires of absolute sovereignty, and has done this to such an extent as to undermine the conditions of possibility for anything like a non-submissive life ‘in balance’ to endure.