It's surely easy to overstate how groundbreaking the film Koyaanisqatsi was at the time of its enthusiastically-received 1982 premiere and its massive-hit-by-cult-film-standards commercial release in 1983, but I would be much more wary of diminishing it than puffing it up. Ever since it was young, an honest reckoning with the techniques and aesthetics of this marvelous collaboration between director Godfrey Reggio, cinematographer Ron Fricke, and composer Philip Glass has insisted that it invents very little, or indeed nothing at all: that its seeming innovations were just repackaging longstanding tricks of the trade in the avant-garde scene, and putting them into a relatively mainstream-friendly package. And that's true enough, but it does a severe disservice to just gloss right over that "mainstream-friendly package" bit - and I might add that "relatively" is doing a simply ludicrous amount of work in that sentence. The miracle of Koyaanisqatsi is making something so incredibly digestible and watchable out of such deeply abstract filmmaking and storytelling principles, something so likable: to put it a different way, I would be extremely hesitant to sit down my (very lovely, good-hearted, high-school-educated) parents in front of e.g. Larry Gottheim's Fog Line or Shirley Clarke's Bridges-Go-Round or even Dziga Vertov's canonical masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera, I would and indeed have shown them Koyaanisqatsi. And they even liked it.

So what, then is Koyaanisqatsi? The history starts with Reggio's days with the Institute for Regional Education, a company producing multimedia campaigns for advocacy groups, which in the mid-'70s had run itself down to only tens of thousands of dollars in the bank. Fricke, who had served as cinematographer on IRE's enormously successful ACLU campaign in New Mexico, was the one who came up with the idea of sinking that money into a feature film, which at least initially just consisted of finding interesting footage of urban environments and the people who lived there, and figuring out what to do with that footage later. The first footage captured featured the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Missouri; street scenes of New York and Los Angeles followed, and then footage of the New Mexico desert. By the end of the decade, Reggio and Fricke had enough to start assembling it into a feature-length object (Fricke served as editor, alongside Alton Walpole), and Reggio was able to convince Glass, likely the most famous minimalist composer at that time, to deign to write a feature-length score to go along with it. And then the film was re-edited to match the score.

That's all well and good as background, but it's simply horrible as a way of trying to tease one's way into the remarkable experience of watching Koyaanisqatsi, which is all at once a pro-environmentalism message movie; an update to the old '20s movie genre of "city symphonies", montages of disonnected or loosely-connected images of life in a particular urban setting; the world's most beautifully-shot slideshow of travel pictures; and a music video accompanying what I suspect remains even now Glass's best-known compositions. What we do with all of that is really entirely up to us. Reggio has consistently held to the line for four decades at this point that the proper way to view Koyaanisqatsi is to simply experience it, and take out of the experience whatever feels right, and I don't think this is necessarily disingenuous: one of the key constants of avant-garde filmmaking across all of its eras and movements and preoccupations (and this is nothing if it's not avant-garde filmmaking, relative commercial success and mainstream visibility notwithstanding) is that the viewer's job is to react to it honestly, regardless of whatever artist's note may or may not have been attached. At the same time, it's not hard to suspect that Reggio only came to this enlightened viewpoint upon witnessing the finished object, and realising that (like so much of the very greatest art) it had escaped from him, and become something more powerful than he'd wanted to make.

Which was petty unmistakably a polemic about the sanctity of nature and the dehumanising ugliness of technology. The film is ultimately structured around Glass's score (which is officially segmented into thirteen parts, though I think you could argue that it's "actually" as few as ten), and this leaves us with a fairly unmistakable narrative: first is "Koyaanisqatsi", in which a glowering organ repeats a funereal motif in the bass line, gloomily insisting on heaviness and doom. Partway through, the melody is picked up on the treble keys, offering a ghostly, no less gloomy but less wrathful counterpart. Meanwhile, a male chorus chants the word "Koyaanisqatsi", steadily and slowly - a word whose definition isn't given until the end of the movie, but they also included it in the ad campaign, so I think we can spoil it:
1. Crazy life. 2. Life in turmoil. 3. Life out of balance. 4. Life disintegrating. 5. A state of life that calls for another way of living.
And while the voices invoke this crazy, tumultuous life, we see it visualised as a glacially slow zoom into a petroglyph of human figures that dissolves into footage of explosive fireballs (these fireballs are the explosions launching the Saturn V rocket into space, which will matter much more at the end of the film).

Reggio and company can say whatever they want about leaving the film open to interpretation, but a film that defines its own title as "state of life that calls for another way of living", and has that title sung over images of rocket engines that feel like the gates of Hell Itself have flown up to usher death and destruction into the movie has, at the very least, intentions about how we should go about reading it. But the thing is, and it's an important part of why Koyaanisqatsi is a masterpiece, it cannot actually follow through on being a message movie - and I'm not even unsympathetic to the film's intended message! I hate cities a lot and love deserts even more! - instead merely opening itself up to possibilities. There are many rhetorical devices within the film's images and within the score to push towards feeling disgusted by the destruction of the land and sickened by the mechanisation of humanity. But there are also devices that make that very same mechanisation seem incomprehensibly beautiful and thrilling.

Once that preamble is over, the film positions itself as a creation myth that doubles as a destruction myth, because that's what every creation myth was to begin with. First, there is "Organic", a semi-ironic title for a passage of the movie in which for a long stretch we see only bare stone in the New Mexico desert. Eventually, the breathtakingly still landscapes give way slightly, and we can see a wobbly shimmer on a distant river that reveals that, even if we can see it, that river is moving, the first thing other than the camera itself that seems to have any kind of vitality at all. And once that movement is established, the film brings in other movement: fog, clouds, more water. And then come trees. We're basically watching the creation of life out of emptiness, while the orchestrations of the music grow more complex (though the melody itself does not). It's the first place where Koyaanisqatsi offers up an opening to read itself as less of a straightforward tale of human avarice than an ambivalent consideration of the constantly fluctuating relationship between nature and technology: the desert is unmistakably beautiful. But for a very long time, the desert is also unmistakably dead. And this tension - nature is pure and static, humanity is vulgar and grotesque but vibrant and vital - will never entirely leave the film, which builds up to a crescendo of this selfsame vibrant vulgarity. Still, the film dwells at length on nature as something awe-inspiring and holy, with the third sequence, "Clouds", in which images of clouds that look like rushing water and roaring waterfalls that look like clouds married to the most ethereal, vocalisations in Glass's score, a meditation on the finest details of how the fabric of the world is in a constant state of flux, every frame providing us a different picture of the shape of the liquid and the vapor, in all of there coruscating unpredictability.

The shift into the fourth segment is possibly the most blatant example in the film of its intended theme prior to the translations at the end: the tuneless, soaring "Clouds" is interrupted with a start by "Resource". Even the name is crude. "Resource". And this is the segment, driven by blaring brass, where we see the earth being ripped up and broken, tractors and bulldozers leaving marks on the soil as they pass and ripping gashes into the world. It's intentionally the very ugliest part of Koyaanisqatsi, visually and sonically, and it leads to a mini-suite of sequences about humanity attempting to live in this disordered chaos-world we've built for ourselves: "Vessels", which brings in actual humans for the first time, followed by "Pruitt Igoe" and "Pruitt Igoe Coda", the earliest and most outraged footage in the project, declaring that we so little value the world that we render our own human selves as trash to be carted away just like the mountains were carted away. And this finally lands at "SloMo People", which uses sped-up and slowed-down footage to examine the hectic rush of being alive in a huge American city in the 1970s, always racing but always staying in place.

It's easy, especially during "Pruitt Igoe", to see how the filmmakers felt this was damning, cruel material - it is damning, cruel material. I may call the film "ambivalent" all I like, but it is unmistakably full of moments that can only be read as mindless destruction rampaging through life, both human and otherwise. There are horrifying images and there are sad images, and Glass's music is full of grim, stabbing gestures that fill both kinds of images with furious rage. There is wantonness here, mindlessness and repetition and clutter - clutter in the compositions, clutter in the movement, clutter in the way the film jangles together moments that fit together because it seems to be sliding into an inchoate state of panic as it tries to fashion a logic for itself in the editing room.

And yet, there is also beauty. Fricke's celebrated work here isn't just capturing grimy human life like a journalist, anxious to shake off all aesthetics in some dubious pursuit of "truth", as if all cinematic images aren't shaped and curated. He is crafting a way of seeing the world that is fresh and new: this is most blatantly obvious in places like the film's iconic shot of a plan appearing to land in between cars on a freeway, thanks to the magic of telephoto lenses, where the physical impossibility of what we're looking at - and yet, this is all really there, so how can it be impossible - serves to make things as unbearably quotidian as lanes of freeway traffic sparkle with mystery and beauty. Koyaanisqatsi isn't just a collection of pretty postcards in motion, it's a compendium of new ways to see the world, both because what is being thrown up on the screen isn't what we generally get to see in movies, but also because so many of the shots have been captured in ways that human eyes don't work. We "need" Koyaanisqatsi to see the world this way because we cannot. And so we get wonderful repeated tricks like the panning shots filmed at the slowest imaginable frame-rate, carefully timed so that a handful of seconds scanning across the skyline in a fluid camera movement captures several hours of night transforming into day. We get shallow fields that transform planes into geometric objects. We see buildings transformed into patterns of color and line, a playground for our eyes to move across.

That Reggio and company knew they were making beautiful images even out of the material they were indicting is most obvious in "The Grid", by far the longest segment of the film and one positioned to be the place where its two lines - one declaiming human technology as destructive, one gawking in amazement at how transformative it can be - crescendo into a psychedelic dreamscape of The Human City as a place that moves so fast that it transforms people into meaningless bits and pieces of mechanical movement. There's something horrifying and robotic about watching people repeat movements at unholy speeds, denuded of their identity as anything other than a fragment of the film's manic rush of speed, speed, speed! But these are also the most beautiful, startling, transfixing images in the movie, with Glass's music speeding up and repeating itself into a kind of joyful hysteria. "The Grid", as a piece of music, is extremely exhausting to listen to, but I find that it's also invariably exciting and thrilling and energising and fun, and it cannot help but imprint itself on the images. Moreso than anywhere else in Koyaanisqatsi, it's here that the music forces rhythm onto the imagery, appearing to make the abstract lines of red and white that we sort of intellectually understand to be cars dance in choreographed throbbing. The sight of hot dogs being extruded from a huge machine, objectively a gross vision of how we've processed ourselves into diseased anti-health, is enthralling with this music driving it forward. And so on.

This merry chaos slams into the slowest, most mournful passage of the movie, "Microchip", in which the grid of a city seen from the sky blurs into the microscopic world of computer boards (right after we see these boards being produced with the same manic determination of hot dogs or rush hour traffic whizzing by, no less). It's the shortest part of the film and the least tuneful, an inarticulate, subterranean gasp for air that's both a release from the raging energy of "The Grid" but also a return to the dead world of "Organic". Except that here, we have created that death ourselves, reducing ourselves to these microscopic things. It's a cold wet slap that takes the the movie to its concluding passage, "Prophecies", where a series of moving portraits of human faces brings us back to ground, and lets the film leave us on some of its most incredible work in defamiliarising the world: it's one thing to make plans and highways and factory floors seem abstract and otherworldly, but this manages, through its uncomfortably intimate slow-motion compositions and Glass's probing music, refusing to resolve itself, to make the human face itself, the most familiar of all images, seem strange a new. Ultimately, the film is less a polemic about nature or beauty, and more a demand that we reorient our way of seeing the world: that we look at things, not merely let them pass by our eyeballs. If I'm being honest, there's not another film that I've ever seen to do a better job of challenging me to see things in fresh, unexpected ways, and it continues to do so every single time I revisit it. It is, simply, one of my favorite films, one of the films closest to my heart, and one of the films most responsible for defining who I am as a person and a viewer of images.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.