5- Samsara and koyaanisqatsi

       by Julian, Madie and Raja          

        

Everyone has a different taste and a different perspective towards movies. Most movies are fiction movies, which deal with fantasy, magic, drama and emotion. The movies we will be talking about today are non-fiction, specifically documentary movies.There are many different types of documentary films, there are certain types of documentaries that are more common, such as nature documentaries and war documentaries. Then there are some obscure types of documentaries, movies that are more often than not on the artistic and unique side of the spectrum, the movies we will be discussing today, "Samsara" and "Koyaanisqatsi" very much fit into that category.

We may have seen many documentaries in our life but “Samsara” was almost definitely the most strange, yet original documentary we had ever seen.. “Samsara” is a Sanskrit word for “continuous flow“, or the repeating cycle of birth, life, and death. It was filmed in 25 countries on five continents over five years. It was shot in 70 mm format and the length of this movie was 136 minute. “Samsara” is the beautiful and sometimes disturbing documentary which offers a look at birth, death and re-birth by showing the morbid atmosphere of churches and cemeteries.

The movie relies on nothing but images and music to tell its story. The story is about the circle of life, anything which was born will die and be reborn. Samsara takes the opportunity to show us the life styles of people in countries we often would not see. The film showed us the worldwide suffering, poverty, greed, violence, lust, war, and financial success. In the middle of suffering and death, we can see that there are passages to rebirth or human transformation. We also saw the filmmaker used elaborate images to show the practices and rituals of Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and Jewish people. “Samsara” shows us the creation and destruction never stops. As the movie starts, we saw Tibetan monks making a circular sand mandala and it shows creation but at the end, we see its destruction. It represents the message of “live in the present moment and enjoy it completely. “

                                          

 It showed a huge difference between eastern and western sides of the world. In the west, the people worked like robots, a fast life with no pause and a good life standard, but on the other side, in east, the people worked where rich people dump their garbage. The film was special itself. It showed the most beautiful images of our world and most striking images that made us shocked. We also see some striking images in this movie, such as people searching in garbage dumps, people mining incredibly toxic sulfur, islands amidst turquoise water, prostitutes in Thailand and factory making sex dolls, etc... We see beautiful places like Dubai where rich people living a great life but on the other side in Africa; people did not have house or clothes to wear. We also see the meat factories and how they treat animals. It is all because what we eat and it raises the quantity of meat factories so they kill more animals for our food. Even though there were no words or subtitles to explain their story, the images explained everything very well. The music was a great support for the image to better understand. The soundtrack helped explain the situation and gave us an idea about the image and we felt that image. The filmmaker did not wanted to be omniscient about his movie so he chose music as his voice. Samsara is not just a movie; it is an experience to know the reality of our world and difference between our lives. It has some beautiful image and most striking images that you would ever see example: - On one side, the people were living a good and rich life but other the other hand, the people were working where others drop garbage which explain the different life style of people. Each image explains the realism. It explains the reality of our world which we do not know. It shows us everything we do, it affects others. It also tells us everything has an end. Once a church was a beautiful place but when it’s time came, It got ruined by flood and so too will the place we call home. Once everything was so perfect and beautiful but everything comes to an end and this is how the new life starts. 

In class we learned about the four dimensions of film editing, which are separate but very often intertwined. The first of them being Graphic Relations, shots linked by graphical similarity, in their shapes our colours, or even the movement of the shots. An example of this is the scene where slums are shown, with all the houses in complete disarray, there seeming to be no order, the scene shown after this is the jail cell. The colours are all very one tone, which is very different from all the colours of the slums shown before. The inmates are dancing, where there seems to be complete order and control.  Rhythmic Relations are when the film maker will edit the the length of shots so that certain images will go by very fast or very slowly, this can change the effect certain images have on an audience. Spatial Relations relate two separate images to eachother through points in the story or just through similarity or difference between the images shown. We compare these in our mind since they are shown in direct correlation with eachother. The last dimension is the Temporal Relation, which is when the film maker will edit the time lapse of images, making them slow down, speed up, go in reverse, or repeat themselves, this is often used in flashbacks. As an example of this, we have a scene where a man is being buried in a casket shaped as a gun, symbolizing death in a gun fight, and the next scenes we see respectively are a gun manufacturer producing hundreds of guns as if they were nothing, and the effect of guns on a man who survived a war. A lot of these sorts of images can be attributed to the Kuloshov effect, which states that one image can be shown before another image to produce a specific reaction, even when the second image is the same, if the first is something different the audience may interpret the second image as something else. The paradigmatic and syntagmatic axis' are two elements of film making that go together to give similar effect as the kuloshov effect. The paradgmatic axis' is described as "what possible meanings are attached the images" and the syntagmatic axis is respectively "relationship between co-presence creates significance" meaning putting the two scenes together creates a specific reaction or emotion. An example of this in samsara is the images of slaughterhouses preparing animals, which cuts to a scene where people are eating fast food inside of a restaurant.

Koyaanisqatsi is a very rare kind of film, most of the genre has been created my artists who work on shared projects. It is a documentary that offers no words or narrative of any kind, and lets the meanings and messages of the film be interpreted completely by the individual viewers. The film has no plot, rather opting for many panning shots of cities and landscapes across the United States. The film sets its tone with music combined with the images chosen for that music. It is the first movie in a trilogy, the trilogy consisting of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi. Koyaanisqatsi is the best known of the three, considered a cult classic. The films imagery is vast and different, ranging from cityscapes to deserts. In my eyes, the main issues of the film were about how human life is effecting the world around us, mostly for the worst. We are no longer connected to nature and no longer value its importance to us. The name Koyaanisqatsi itself is Hopi Indian for "Life out of Balance". The very first images we see are of cave drawings, showing some of the first ever recorded human interactions with nature, and we see how long our actions can last. Rather than showing the contrast and differences between American Indian society and more modernized US society, the movie gives more of a feeling of humans versus no humans, with a possible bias on the side of no humans. The message is left to your interpretation and yet youd be hard pressed to see something other than what Godfrey Reggio wants you to see. The soundtrack, composed by Philip Glass, is beautiful and very well fitting with the images to make you feel a certain way, even if you are given the impression of a unique experience. Some of the more heavy imagery to me were the images of bombs and tanks, which are very different from the images of nature, symbolizing corruption and destruction opposed to peace and harmony. The amount of shots and detail that went into this film is probably what stands out the most for me, the sheer amount of footage and places shown in this film are staggering. The amount of awards this film has earned is not very surprising considering its very high praise. Koyaanisqatsi leaves me with my own thoughts in ways many documentaries fail to do, I feel movies like this are an important subject to be studied and discussed and if done correctly can be a way to get a very very powerful message across without forcing it too heavily on your audience, while I dont think there ever can be a film that is completely unbiased, this genre comes very close in my opinion. The film itself shows many examples of temporal and spatial relations, there are many examples of natural areas being portrayed, then images of cities and man made environments appears over the natural areas, giving a sense of time passing and humans taking over and even destroying the environment. An example of rhythmic relations is when the large passenger plane is being filmed, it stays on screen driving towards the camera for a while, showing the immensity of the plane and really giving the audience the idea of strength. There are several people shown up close, being filmed just standing there and looking into the camera, as a picture this would seem normal but when people are looking right into the camera and doing nothing while being filmed, we get a sense of deeper though going on, possibly anxiety or sadness even. An example of graphic relations and rhythmic relations together is when we are shown many cars going by at night, and then the sun rising. The cars going by is sped up considerably so that their headlights form a constant red light going through the streets, the image is then contrasted when it cuts to the sun raising quickly, but still much slower and much more powerful looking than the artificial light caused by the cars. This fits as well into the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axis', with the car lights being shown first and the sun being shown second. The car lights alone could make you think that what humans have done is amazing, many many large manmade vehicles moving fast in a rhythm, but when contrasted to the image of the sun, seems small and insignificant, the sun being much larger, much brighter, and ever-present.

Samsara and Koyaanisqatsi are both similar movies because they are both beautiful and are an overall look at life and the world in general. They also use no dialogue or a narrative but instead rely on music and images to tell the story and set the tone and mood.

While these movies are both similar in terms of style and story, Samsara and Koyaanisqatsi are both different. Samsara is different from Koyaanisqatsi because while Koyaanisqatsi was filmed in 22 places and most of the places were in the USA, Samsara was filmed in 25 different countries and 5 continents and it took 5 years to make while Koyaanisqatsi took 6 years to make.

Both Samsara and Koyaanisqatsi are also different in terms of storytelling. The name Samsara means “continuous flow” and the film is about birth, life, death and rebirth. On the other hand, Koyaanisqatsi is about “life out of balance” and relies on the music and environmental imagery.

Koyaanisqatsi shows the audience a journey around America showing landscapes and cities and Samsara does the same but on a bigger scale because it shows places around the world. Samsara shows how people live a good life in places like Dubai but also shows people that don't have food or clothing. We get to see different cultures from different places. We get to see things such as sex dolls being made and how food is made from animals and babies being baptized which goes with the themes of birth,life,death and rebirth. The filmmakers of both these movies were translated their ideas well to screen because of the cinematography and the places they showed and the pacing was good in Samsara but the pacing was too slow in Koyaanisqatsi. The filmmakers of Koyaanisqatsi didn’t really challenge our view of the world because not much was shown but the filmmakers of Samsara did challenge our view of the world because it introduced ideas and cultures.

Both Samsara and Koyaanisqatsi show life everyday on earth but the biggest difference between them is that Koyaanisqatsi is focused more on America while Samsara is about life everyday on earth around the globe.

Both movies are very beautiful in a cinematic way but Samsara is recommended more because it shows a lot more of the world then Koyaanisqatsi does and Samsara is more entertaining then Koyaanqatsi because while Koyaanisqatsi does have beautiful imagery, it can be really boring and dull in some scenes due to it sometimes focuses on one setting too long. For example, for the first twenty minutes of the movie,it focuses on mountains and the sky a little longer then it needs to be. Samsara on the other hand, jumps around from place to place and it shows more culture then Koyaanisqatsi.

Personally I was more invested in Samsara then Koyaanisqatsi because I wanted to see what Samsara would show next while watching the movie, but I was not that invested in Koyaanisqatsi.

What we can learn about ourselves through Samsara and Koyaanisqatsi is that we all see the world is beautiful, but we may not know much about it because we are not introduced to new cultures and new ideas very often. We can also learn that there is both good and bad in the world in many different forms, not always completely subjective. These films, particularly Samsara, make us think about how we see the world ,but also makes us think about what we don’t see about the world which relates to society in general because sometimes we think we know about the whole world when we really don't know as much as we probably should about the world outside of us.

Both Samsara and Koyaanisqatsi are really well made and beautiful non-fiction movies but we recommend Samsara more for showing more places and cultures. Samsara is one of the best non-fiction movies we have seen in a while because Samsara is a documentary showing us the world and different cultures in a unique way. Samsara is not only one of the most original documentaries we have seen but also one of the best movies to watch if we want to see open ourselves up to life beyond our bubble. Samsara is enjoyable for anyone with different tastes towards movies whether its fiction or non-fiction.