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List Price: $14.98Amazon.com's Price: $13.49 You Save: $1.49 (10%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audience Rating: G (General Audience)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 9780792853374
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
ISBN: 0792853377
Label: MGM (Video & DVD)
Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: MGM (Video & DVD)
Region Code: 1
Release Date: September 17, 2002
Running Time: 99 minutes
Sales Rank: 18600
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Theatrical Release Date: 1988-05
Editorial Review:
Description:
Hailed by audiences and critics around the world as mesmerizing (The Detroit News), this second installment of writer/director Godfrey Reggio's apocalyptic qatsi trilogy is quite simply one of the most magnificent visual and aural spectacles ever made (L.A. Daily News)! Combining stunning cinematography with the exquisite music of award-winning composer Philip Glass, Powaqqatsi is a breathtaking experience working on many levels'emotional, spiritual, intellectual andaesthetic (The Hollywood Reporter)! Bold, haunting and epic in scale, this extraordinary film calls into question everything we think we know about contemporary society. By juxtaposing images of ancient cultures with those of modern life, Powaqqatsi masterfully portrays the human cost of progress. It is a film that engages the soul as well as the mind; it is truly an absorbing experience (Movies on TV and Videocassette).
Amazon.com:
Powaqqatsi, or 'life in transformation,' is the second part of a projected trilogy of experimental documentaries whose titles derive from Hopi compound nouns. The now legendary Koyaanisqatsi, or 'life out of balance,' was the first. Naqoyqatsi, or 'life in war,' once it obtains funding, will be the third. Powaqqatsi finds director Godfrey Reggio somewhat more directly polemical than before, and his major collaborator, the composer Philip Glass, stretching to embrace world music.
Reggio reuses techniques familiar from the previous film (slow motion, time-lapse, superposition) to dramatize the effects of the so-called First World on the Third: displacement, pollution, alienation. But he spends as much time beautifully depicting what various cultures have lost--cooperative living, a sense of joy in labor, and religious values--as he does confronting viewers with trains, airliners, coal cars, and loneliness. What had been a more or less peaceful, slow-moving, spiritually fulfilling rural existence for these 'silent' people (all we hear is music and sound effects) becomes a crowded, suffocating, accelerating industrial urban hell, from Peru to Pakistan. Reggio frames Powaqqatsi with a telling image: the Serra Pelada gold mines, where thousands of men, their clothes and skin imbued with the earth they're moving, carry wet bags up steep slopes in a Sisyphean effort to provide wealth for their employers. While Glass juxtaposes his strangely joyful music, which includes the voices of South American children, a number of these men carry one of their exhausted comrades out of the pit, his head back and arms outstretched--one more sacrifice to Caesar. Nevertheless, Reggio, a former member of the Christian Brothers, seems to maintain hope for renewal. --Robert Burns Neveldine
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Phenomenal Integration of Sight and Sound
This is the second in the "Qatsi" trilogy presented by director Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass (plus many other gifted persons). It can stand alone as a fantastic sight and sound metaphor on the progress (or rather regress) of the "Southern Peoples" of the planet as the values of the "Western/Northern Peoples" infiltrate in virus-like manner to depersonify and disenfranchise people from their cultural roots. It is an apt sequel to Koyaanisqatsi and precursor to the third and final film ... Read More
Rating:  - Is this film for you?
Allow me to step backwards for a brief moment and ask an important question: Is it possible to enjoy this film without delving into the quasi-intellectual mind? In other words, is this a film you would choose to watch on a lazy Saturday afternoon?
To answer that question, it's really going to depend on who you are, what you readily enjoy about film (in general), and what sort of time you wish to spend with an artistic documentary with absolutely no dialogue and seemingly no plot. ... Read More
Rating:  - I M H O
This movie drags on and on...it is has some striking scenery in the beginning and you oooh and ahhh for the first 15 minutes, but then it just drags out until I finally turned it off...Boring! I can see what point they were trying to make, but they took too long to make it. Everything could have surmised in a nice, short 30 minute version...Don't waste your time...
Rating: - When will that train ever stop?
With a never ending train (in Africa, raw materials trains can be even longer - several kilometers I've heard), with that inimitable music to boot, Powaqquatsi shifts gear to reveal the complex world of Western civilisation after lots of shots of people in the third world and various graphic image collections from the rural developing world. The opening sequence of miners hauling up dirt is powerful. Amongst the best things about the film is the music and the skill in editing. Lots of people stare ... Read More
Rating: - different kind of film experience
This movie begs you to think...it bombards you with images, sometimes directly related...sometimes thematically linked... and tells a story about the world, forcing you to see the intricacies of life, how the world has been transformed...what in that transformation is abrasive and harmful, and what is intriguing, mysterious and beautiful...unfortunately the music isn't a brilliant as the film...but still...for anyone interested in indie film/documentary and image-flooding...this is an excellent buy.
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