Ghosts in Our Own Machines: A Review of Naqoyqatsi

It's been pretty quiet 'round these parts as the summer begins to wind down and August and the new semester approach. But I recently posted the following review on Amazon, and I thought I'd post it here (with some minor editing) as well.

Breughel's The Tower of Babel, which also serves as the opening image from Naqoyqatsi. Image found here.

This film, the third and last of the Qatsi trilogy, is every bit as visually and sonically spectacular as its predecessors. But, though it clearly belongs with them, it is finally a less hopeful film than the first two. I suspect, though, that that's part of director Godfrey Reggio's point. Any film that opens with an image of the Tower of Babel is probably not going to be very hope-filled.

In Koyaanisqatsi ("Life Out of Balance") and Powaqqatsi ("Life in Transformation"), the two realms being compared and contrasted (respectively, natural and urban spaces, and indigenous and Western ways of living) were given fairly equivalent amounts of screen time, suggesting (to me, at least) the possibility of an equilibrium being achieved between the two--if not within the space of the film, then among viewers as they ponder how best to live. Perhaps that is why I prefer the first two films. Naqoyqatsi, released 14 years after Powaqqatsi, seems to suggest that that possibility of equilibrium has been lost: Technology, as signified in the film by its recurring sequences of strings of binary numbers, not to mention the digital generation and/or alteration of the vast majority of what we see on the screen, has ceased being only a tool by and through which we interact with nature. It has become, in significant ways, our surrogate for nature, blurring our traditional notions of what is "natural" and what is "artificial." The short sequence in which we see the head of Dolly the sheep (image found here)

encapsulates this idea for me: as she moves her head from side to side, the image blurs, doubling and tripling, raising in a visual way the philosophical questions raised by our ability to clone animals.

Technology, this film seems to argue, is the worst sort of dystopia: one that we don't entirely realize we live in because we can no longer be entirely sure whether what we see is the world as it is, or whether it's been tweaked to our liking or convenience.

As if in counterpoint to all this, though, Philip Glass's score floats over all of what we see; it's scored for a small orchestra and isn't as heavy (or heavy-handed) as was his music for the first two films. Lovers of cello will want to hear in particular Yo-Yo Ma's elegant performances.

I will be showing this film to my students this fall. I am hoping one of them will note the film's outdated computer graphics; I'm hoping he'll say that we have better graphics now. "Better? In what way?" "Ours are more realistic." "Yes--and? Is a near-invisible line between the real and the computer-generated necessarily a good thing?"

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Some notes on the opening of The Conversation

Over at his excellent film blog, Scanners, Jim Emerson has an ongoing feature called the Opening Shots Projects. Here's its rationale, in brief:

1) The movie is about what happens to you while you watch it. So, pay attention -- to both the movie and your response. If you have reactions to, or questions about, what you're seeing, chances are they'll tell you something about what the movie is doing. Be aware of your questions, emotions, apprehensions, expectations.

2) The opening shot (or opening sequence) is the most important part of the movie... at least until you get to the final shot. (And in good movies, the two are often related.)

The opening shot can tell us a lot about how to interpret what follows. It can even be the whole movie in miniature.

(The full (I assume) list of films discussed is here.)

In the spirit of these examinations, I want to try my hand at writing one of these for the opening shot of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film The Conversation.

The short review, first of all: This is a first-rate, tightly-constructed suspense film worthy of Hitchcock. (Indeed, at a couple of moments it seems to pay quick homage to Vertigo via the films' shared San Francisco setting, but that's a subject for another post.) Its real subject, though, is its central figure, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), and his gradual emotional investment in the task he's been given despite his usual ability to remain detached from his assignments. For a couple of reasons, I am considering showing The Conversation to my Comp classes in lieu of the Hitch films I've been showing, and the only thing that makes me hesitate is the film's slow-paced middle section: most of it does nothing to advance the story, but it's absolutely vital for our understanding of Harry.

Here's the clip, via Turner Classic Movies (you might want to follow the link to see the full image as it plays):



The discussion is below the fold.

This high overhead shot of Union Square has to be one of the slowest zoom-ins in cinema. Lately, I've become fascinated by how static and nearly-static cameras hold our attention in ways that rapid cutting does not; this film is filled with such shots, and so the opening is already preparing us to be patient and watchful. Our eyes sweep the space we're shown; we look for something without (yet) having any clue as to what that something is.

The credits play an interesting role in all of this via their placement on the screen relative to the scene: though the frame is, at first, centered on the median that forms the square's central axis, the credits appear in in the lower-right corner of the frame, balanced by the grey space of the promenade that, as the shot tightens, will come to dominate the entire left-hand side of the frame. Thus, the viewer's attention keeps getting pulled back and forth between that space and the text of the credits. Thus, the credits' distracting us from watching the square creates in us, before this movie about surveillance has even begun, the great fear that we're missing something. (Why else would the camera be taking its own sweet time zooming in?) From about the 1:10 mark on, though, the shot has become tight enough that the credits--now listing those unimportant people who, you know, actually made the film--are now superimposed over the median, which allows our attention to shift over to the promenade. Perhaps for the first time, we now notice the mime; perhaps, we wonder, he will be this sequence's subject, at least for a little while.

The audio for this shot is surprisingly quiet; its ambient, faraway quality befits the positioning of the camera high above the proceedings, isolating us emotionally even as we wonder what, if anything, we are looking for. The first clear sound we hear is a small jazz ensemble playing in a Dixieland style, the most prominent instruments being the clarinet and tenor sax. The tenor sax, we'll learn, is Harry's instrument of choice--and,

and, we'll learn, forms an aural bookend for the film. (Image found here.)

For a little over a minute, all we hear is the ambient noise drifting up to us from the square; then, at the 1:05 mark, we suddenly hear a bubbling electronic sound of some sort that ends as abruptly as it has begun. We're given no explanation for it. We'll hear a similar sound at around 1:45, again with no clue as to what we're hearing, but from then on it will recur more frequently in the scene--clearly, then, it is something of significance for this scene--and, well learn, for the film.

During all this time--from about 1:10 to about 2:12--the camera's attention, or at least that of our eyes, has been on the mime, who keeps in nearly constant motion, moving both with and against the general flow of traffic in the square. At the 2:12 mark, though, the mime begins to circle a man on the edge of the crowd. This man is balding, he's wearing classes and a grey translucent raincoat. (It's a cool but sunny December day.) Harry Caul's raincoat effectively names him before we actually know his name; he wears it even when he's lying in bed with his girlfriend Amy (Teri Garr). Moreover, in scene after scene some sort of membrane-like material will be interposed between Harry and the audience. There is much more to say about this coat, but we don't yet know this.

From 2:12 till about 3:04, Harry will begin to walk away from our vantage point, the mime following him for a bit. At the 3:04 mark, the point of view suddenly shifts: we seem to be at or near ground level, looking up (perhaps Harry's perspective?) toward the large City of Paris sign on a rooftop, a man sitting under it. Another cut, and now we're on the roof observing the man; he's pointing what appears at first to be a rifle but is really a specialized microphone with a rifle scope on it. A few seconds more, and we'll peer through the scope with him as he watches a couple (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams), the earlier electronic sounds burbling in earnest now. This unintelligible sound, we suddenly realize, is why we're here, but as to what it means . . .

These three-and-a-half minutes here are the film's essence in a nutshell: the introduction of the plot and principle characters; the establishing of jazz as a leitmotif that will run up to and including the last scene of the film; the introduction of its central themes of surveillance and the decoding of language. It's brilliant in and of itself; as a kind of Cliff's Notes for the entirety of the film, it's hard to imagine how it could be more effective.

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"A track-repairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth":Thoreau and late capitalism

A stretch of the railroad between Fitchburg and Concord. Image found here.

One would think that there'd be no need to write something like a post with the title that this one has: that a fairly attentive reading of Walden or, less directly, "Life Without Principle" would reveal to the reader pretty clearly what the Concord Curmudgeon would have to say about such things.

Just as a refresher, though, here's a bit from Walden's first chapter, "Economy," that should make my point: "I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. . . . [their] principle object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched. In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high." For Thoreau, the essence of capitalism--by which I mean, what drives capitalism--is not to make stuff that people need but to cause people to want stuff enough to pay money for it. That these two dynamics might actually overlap, as in the public's need to be clothed and factories' producing of clothes, is incidental.

But then a few weeks ago, I read Crispen Sartwell's piece, "My Walden, My Walmart"; and, you know, what better do I have to do this summer than respond to dumb arguments about my man Thoreau?

Here's the essence of Sartwell's piece (forgive the length--he rambles a bit, which is actually appropriate to his argument):

We are at a cultural moment when living in close proximity and having many close friends and a ceaseless embracing community are thought to be unalloyed goods. “Bowling alone” is our shorthand for personal despair and social disintegration.

However, as I dare say you — like Jean-Paul Sartre — have noticed, people can be annoying. We need distance from, as much as we need association with, one another. Thoreau tried for both: he would walk from Walden Pond to Concord, hang out with his dear friends the Emersons and the Alcotts, and then retreat to his hovel to be fairly happily alone.

If on such occasions Thoreau was thinking in his reflective way that human beings are animals and that what we do is natural, then he did not consider his stroll into Concord a departure from nature but an exploration of a bit of it. And this is the way I feel about Walmart, which — big-box island in a blacktop sea — is a perfectly natural object, as much an environment as my woods.

[snip]

Unlike Thoreau, I have cable. Yet Thoreau and I commune, more or less the same way that Greg [an acquaintance Sartwell mentions earlier] and I do, across space and time. And that’s how I can assure you that, if Thoreau were around today, he’d be pushing a cart through a Walmart three miles from Walden Pond with a bag of socks, a gallon of milk and a Blu-ray player, nodding pleasantly at people he sort of recognizes.

Now, keep in mind: Given my job as a professor of English who teaches composition classes, I have seen my fair share of bad arguments. I'm not thin-skinned as far as that is concerned. However, that Sartwell makes such claims and also earns his living as a professor of philosophy is, um, disconcerting. My most charitable reading of this piece is that Sartwell is working from a fading memory of Thoreau. Otherwise, it's very very hard to see how he would have come to these conclusions after a recent and/or attentive reading of Walden. Or, maybe he sees Walmart's ads' current tag-line, "Save money. Live better," as Thoreauvian in quality. To that I'd say, Well, yes; but I think it fair to say that each arrives at very different means by which to accomplish those ends.

No, there were no Walmarts in Concord. But there were railroads. And I think one can argue that in Thoreau's meditation on the Fitchburg railroad--its physical attributes, the work required to build and maintain it, and the physical and socioeconomic work it performs (and performs on us, as well)--we can catch a glimpse of what Thoreau might have to say about Walmart.

The railroad is about a quarter-mile from Thoreau's cabin and he writes that he often uses its roadbed as his route into Concord, so it is a recurring presence in Walden; however, Thoreau discusses it at length in Chapter 4, "Sounds." These several pages are an ambivalently-mixed bag. On the one hand, Thoreau writes, "I am refreshed and expanded when when the freight train rattles past me[. . . ] I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoa-nut husks, the old junk, gunny bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This car-load of torn sails is more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? They are proof-sheets that need no correction." And so on, in this vein, for a while. Yet even in this ostensibly positive passage, we catch a glimpse of something that Thoreau will say much more directly, both in this chapter and elsewhere: that the railroad facilitates and participates in capitalism's transforming of raw or discarded materials into new goods that as a result hide their materials' origins--and, not coincidentally, their human costs.

In "Economy," Walden's first chapter, Thoreau talks about goods in terms not of their price but of their cost: "the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." For Thoreau, this clearly extends to the labor performed to achieve something that is more likely to benefit people other than those who have built it--and, moreover, this idea of cost extends even to the supposed beneficiaries of these goods or services. Thoreau's chief example of this, throughout Walden, is the railroad. Witness, as just one example (from "Where I Lived, What I lived For," his extended punning on the old name for railroad ties:

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. . . . I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.

I don't think it takes a great deal of imagination to apply this sort of critique to Walmart: its efforts to reduce prices for its customers serves to hide the costs of those efforts on its own workers and those of the companies who have made those goods, just as the railroad's enormous capacity for hauling goods overwhelms with its power and at the same time makes harder to see that that same capacity makes obsolete the drovers and wagoneers formerly needed to deliver those same goods. Why Sartwell thinks that Thoreau would contentedly push his cart around Walmart, instead of, at the very least, performing a silent cost-benefit analysis of the sort with which Walden is shot through, makes me wonder if Walmart has indeed succeeded in hypnotizing him with the allure of cheap tube socks.

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