RT Book,_Section
T1 Blinking Spaces: Koyaanisqatsi’s Cinematic City
A1 Villarmea Álvarez, Iván
A2 Walton, David
A2 Suárez, Juan A.
K1 Film Studies
K1 Non-Fiction Film
K1 Experimental Film
K1 Koyaanisqatsi
K1 Gdofrey Reggio
K1 Modernity
K1 Postmodernity
K1 Urban Space
K1 Cinematic City
K1 City Symphonies
AB The concept of post-industrialism refers to the transition of western societies from an economy based on production and manufactured goods to another based on consumption and signs. The most profitable activities in this new paradigm no longer belong to the manufacturing sector but to the service one, and more specifically to the finance, insurance and real estate sectors. From the 1980s, revolutions in transport and communications have made it possible to relocate both labour and production away from urban centres, which have been abandoned or renewed according to the economic success of their respective cities: old industrial and port cities have lost their former dominant position to become urban wastelands replete with derelict factories and useless docks, while so-called global cities have been able to create spectacular cityscapes –whether simulated or restored ones– in order to attract capital and people. This process has been developed in two stages: the first one, which covered the 1970s and 1980s, was characterised by urban decay; while the second, which spanned from the late 1980s to the late 2000s, resorted to the creative destruction of the city to clean up rundown areas and replace obsolete infrastructures. In this context, American experimental filmmaker Godfrey Reggio recovered the aesthetics of modernist urban symphonies in order to reflect on this paradigm shift and the gradual decline of the old industrial city. His first documentary feature, Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (1982), documented the collapse of the modern metropolis through a modernist device full of contradictions: it uses high technology to criticise the use of high technology, it apparently takes sides with humankind but it does not adopt the human gaze, it is visually modern but structurally post-modern, etc. Consequently, the film is located at the turning point between modernity and post-modernity, the industrial and the post-industrial city, the external and the internal gaze at the city. This in-between position is ideal to depict the short interregnum between urban crisis and urban renewal, a time in which the modernist concept of urban planning was gradually replaced by the post-modernist notion of urban design.The cinematic city depicted in Koyaanisqatsi –which is made up from images of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and St. Louis– basically exposes one of the long-term consequences of modernity: the homogenisation of lifestyles caused by the vicious circle of production, mobility and consumption. At the time, Reggio’s perception of the old industrial metropolis was highly influenced by anti-modernist criticism, which ultimately determined the implicit reasoning of the film: if all cities have the same lifestyles, productive dynamics and social problems, there is no difference between living in one or another, because the resulting urban experience will always be the same. The only alternative to this life in turmoil would be, according to the film, the return to the natural environment, a thesis that is clearly anti-modernist if not directly anti-urban. In this regard, this paper aims to analyse the way Godfrey Reggio built an anti-modernist discourse on urban change through formal strategies that were originally modern, thereby explaining the agenda and meaning of Koyaanisqatsi in both its historical context and the present time.
PB Lexington Books
SN 9781498521666
YR 2015
FD 2015
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10347/46186
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10347/46186
LA eng
NO Villarmea Álvarez, I. 2015. Blinking Spaces: Koyaanisqatsi’s Cinematic City. In Walton, D. & Suárez, J. A. (eds.), Culture, Space and Power: Blurred Lines (pp. 33 - 43). Lexington Books
NO Este capítulo, que xa aparecía nunha versión previa na miña tese de doutoramento, 'From Post-Industrial City to Postmetropolis: The Representation of Urban Change in Non-Fiction Film (1977-2010)', está incluído nun volume colectivo publicado pola editorial Lexington Books (un sello pertencente á casa Rowman & Littlefield que ten sido adquirido por Bloomsbury Publishing en 2024), que ocupaba en 2022 a posición 67 do ranking xeral de editoriais estranxeiras do SPI cunha valoración ICEE de 10 puntos.
DS Minerva
RD 21 abr 2026