Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

Ron Fricke's first effort as cinematographer. If you like Baraka and Samsara, check out this much earlier work. Worth it just to see the passage of history since then. The wild background soundtrack is by Philip Glass and Fricke.

The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. Reggio explained the lack of dialogue by stating "it's not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It's because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live." In the Hopi language, the word koyaanisqatsi means "life out of balance".