Koyaanisqatsi of the Will

I'm just now in the midst of screening Koyaanisqatsi for my friend, the ethno-musicologist's class at Luther. It's a long time since I've seen it on a big screen and with a great sound system. During the opening """Nature""" part, I felt very similar to when I watch Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. As if I am receiving a pre-battle pep-talk piped directly to parts of the mind, bypassing the symbolic realm of language. When the film shifts to the obviously very bad bad bad awful horrible machines and people and cities, I got so bored, I opened up this blog post. The ideology of bad machine, people, and cities is not compelling like the opening segments.

All of which gets me thinking yet again of the book chapter I recently resubmitted called "Ecocinema and Ideology: Do Ecocritics Dream of a Clockwork Green?"

A chapter I open with the following epigraph:

‘What exactly is it, sir, that you’re going to do?’

‘Oh,’ said Dr Branom, his cold stetho going all down my back, ‘it’s quite simple, really. We just show you some films.’

‘Films?’ I said. I could hardly believe my ookos, brothers, as you may well understand. ‘You mean,’ I said, ‘it will be just like going to the pictures?’

‘They’ll be special films,’ said Dr Branom. ‘Very special films.’

---A Clockwork Orange