We are but dust and grime upon the face of the earth...
When this visual opera of the senses was released, somehow I managed to miss it for all these years. Only now, have I been able to get a DVD and feast myself to one of the most mesmerizing documentaries I've seen. Now I can get to see the sequels...
In the twenty-five years since its release, nothing much has fundamentally changed. The only real difference is that the scale of life out of balance has ballooned to the point where humanity has finally realized perhaps too late that we are indeed on the path to self-destruction unless radical steps are taken to change our ways. Some might argue that I'm too pessimistic and point to the Montreal protocol (it set the wheels in motion to stop using CFCs that were causing the depletion of the earth's ozone layer) as proof that we can pull together when danger is imminent.
Perhaps true...but the problem is that many still don't think that life on earth not in the upper atmosphere is truly out of balance. This documentary takes us all back to what it was like all those years ago and, as you will see or have seen on your TV news programs today, it's now all that much worse...
The metaphors abound, beginning with Earth, Air and Water as the three dominant and necessary conditions that permit life on this planet, then relentlessly but gradually, showing how humanity changes the very conditions that support balanced life. Mountains explode, fires consume, people increase and multiply together with the trappings humanity needs to keep consuming: traffic jams, food and automobile production, steel and glass monuments to Mammon surely a parody of Kubrick's images of the monolithic Sentinel in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) freeways that look like arteries with blood coursing through veins, images from space that show glowing cities which morph into electronic circuits for computers we've become the machines we've invented and, of course, the milling millions, moving through life as though they are the walking dead, oblivious to all except the self and self-gratification.
It is at once a pretty picture and a damning one of particular note, the sequenced implosion of the abandoned Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St Louis, designed, ironically, by the architect of the World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki.
The music very sensibly doesn't belabour the use of the title; it's chanted only during the opening sequence and during the finale which, in my opinion, is the most stunning tracking shot I've seen yet as the camera follows the detritus from an exploding rocket (a Russian one, I think) plunging back to earth. For the rest of it, just sit back, let the music waft over and through you as you watch your future begin.
This is a film that everybody should see at least once.
When this visual opera of the senses was released, somehow I managed to miss it for all these years. Only now, have I been able to get a DVD and feast myself to one of the most mesmerizing documentaries I've seen. Now I can get to see the sequels...
In the twenty-five years since its release, nothing much has fundamentally changed. The only real difference is that the scale of life out of balance has ballooned to the point where humanity has finally realized perhaps too late that we are indeed on the path to self-destruction unless radical steps are taken to change our ways. Some might argue that I'm too pessimistic and point to the Montreal protocol (it set the wheels in motion to stop using CFCs that were causing the depletion of the earth's ozone layer) as proof that we can pull together when danger is imminent.
Perhaps true...but the problem is that many still don't think that life on earth not in the upper atmosphere is truly out of balance. This documentary takes us all back to what it was like all those years ago and, as you will see or have seen on your TV news programs today, it's now all that much worse...
The metaphors abound, beginning with Earth, Air and Water as the three dominant and necessary conditions that permit life on this planet, then relentlessly but gradually, showing how humanity changes the very conditions that support balanced life. Mountains explode, fires consume, people increase and multiply together with the trappings humanity needs to keep consuming: traffic jams, food and automobile production, steel and glass monuments to Mammon surely a parody of Kubrick's images of the monolithic Sentinel in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) freeways that look like arteries with blood coursing through veins, images from space that show glowing cities which morph into electronic circuits for computers we've become the machines we've invented and, of course, the milling millions, moving through life as though they are the walking dead, oblivious to all except the self and self-gratification.
It is at once a pretty picture and a damning one of particular note, the sequenced implosion of the abandoned Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St Louis, designed, ironically, by the architect of the World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki.
The music very sensibly doesn't belabour the use of the title; it's chanted only during the opening sequence and during the finale which, in my opinion, is the most stunning tracking shot I've seen yet as the camera follows the detritus from an exploding rocket (a Russian one, I think) plunging back to earth. For the rest of it, just sit back, let the music waft over and through you as you watch your future begin.
This is a film that everybody should see at least once.