Naqoyqatsi: Life as War

The third in the Qatsi trilogy by Godfrey Reggio. The first two were all regular photography, of real things and places, doctored only by slow motion and time lapse here and there. This one is entirely different. Just about every frame is morphed some way or another, with fisheye lenses, solarization, slomo, multiple images, and most of all, acres and acres of computer generated imagery. If it suffers in any way it is that CGI has come so far so fast that today (2012) the stuff from ten years ago is not nearly as mind-boggling as it would have been back then. A hazard of the technology, I guess. This one really seems to be more about tech than war, though there are images of violence, soldiers, nuclear blasts, riots and such. But much is made of the digital world we were entering in 2002, and into which we are now fully engaged. As in all the others, I spent no time looking for the “author’s message,” simply sitting back and letting the images and music unfold. I thoroughly enjoyed it, though probably not as much as the first two.