Koyaanisqatsi and Montaigne
A few years ago I suddenly noticed
that Koyaanisqatsi and Montaigne's Of Cannibals share
the same strategy of argumentation. Koyaanisqatsi is all about "a
state of life that calls for another way of living," as the title suggests.
It is a satire on modernism and modern America (America of the 1970s,
at any rate), indignantly using humor and exaggeration by turns to make points
as any good satire does. Like a good essay, it approaches its topic with a species
of meaningful indirectness. We are (as the other contributions to this node
point out) taken from the unspoiled, majestic canyons of the southwest (a Good
Thing) through an ascending tempo to the sterile, crowded artificial canyons of our cities,
full of antlike commuters (a Bad Thing). So far, so good, and all pretty easily
understood.
It is the order of presentation that
is interesting and shows how much thought went into this landmark film. By starting
with beautiful, slow, majestic images backed by a noble, simple score, Godfrey Reggio
sets this nexus of ideas up as the positive soil into which he plants an important
idea. He carefully brings in subtly chosen references to Native Americans in
order to maximally exploit their reputation as people uncorrupted by the rat
race who live in tune with nature by showing their rock art as one with the
elemental landscape. Had Reggio shown us actual images of the reservation at
this stage, he would have risked spoiling his effect by forcing the viewer to
confront the fact that Native Americans, like all decent, three-dimensional human beings,
have some unattractive characteristics, and the reservation is not wholly free
of squalor. Since he brings them in only by implication through rock art, Reggio
leaves us free to concentrate on the positive side of their character.
Everything that follows the initial
sequence must inevitably be viewed in its shadow, and by concentrating positive
sentiments in that initial sequence Reggio artfully co-opts us into adopting
that Native American viewpoint throughout the film. In a sense, we stick ourselves
in the shoes of Native American observers and turn ourselves into the film's
protagonist, offering our own silent, skeptical commentary on the images of
our civilization. However Native Americans enter the film, they are not the
true subject of it, but a foil helping to expose the deficiencies of our civilization.
The notion of people uncorrupted and unspoiled by contact with civilization,
and the sense that they possess a naturally privileged viewpoint in assessing
more sophisticated people is an old idea to which Rousseau gave the name "noble
savage." Although the term risks being misunderstood because of the negative
connotations of "savage" in everyday English, the word is more closely
related to the original French sauvage, meaning "wild", in
the sense of natural, untamed, or uncorrupted. Reggio, therefore, has
exploited the concept of the noble savage in generating negative commentary
on American civilization in his audience.
People are culturally trained in
the US to feel ashamed about what we did to the Native Americans, and we compensate
in a way by re-imagining them as better than ouselves (we might call this Dances
with Wolves syndrome). It's easy for Reggio to invoke them as a type of
noble savage and make us sympathetic to them as we watch the movie.
Montaigne included his brilliant
Of Cannibals in the Essais, published in 1580. It is deservedly
a staple in undergraduate humanities courses, and it parallels Koyaanisqatsi
in important ways. We are once again introduced to the main topic (problems
in European, and specifically French civilization) in an indirect way: through
the description of one of the native peoples of Brazil. Although he predates
Rousseau by some two centuries, he fully develops the concept of the noble savage:
"Those people are wild, just
as we call wild the fruits that Nature has produced by herself and in her
normal course; whereas really it is those we have changed artificially and
led astray from the common order, that we should rather call wild. The former
retain alive and vigorous their genuine, their most useful and natural, virtues
and properties, which we have debased in the latter in adapting them to gratify
our corrupted taste. And yet for all that, the savor and delicacy of some
uncultivated fruits of those countries is quite as excellent, even to our
taste, as that of our own. It is not reasonable that art should win the place
of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded
the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite
smothered her. . . . All our efforts cannot even succeed in reproducing the
nest of the tiniest little bird, its contexture, its beauty, and convenience;
or even the web of the puny spider. All things, says Plato, are produced by
nature, by fortune, or by art; the greatest and most beautiful by one or the
other of the first two, the least and most imperfect by the last."
These noble savages practice a form
of cannibalism upon their defeated enemies which Montaigne is at pains to portray
as noble; and in fact, in his entire description of the ostensibly barbarous
customs of these people Montaigne is ironically drawing a comparison with their
European counterparts, who inevitably come off the worse. See how he handles
the thorny issue of the cannibalism per se:
"I am not sorry that we notice
the barbarous horror of such acts, but I am heartily sorry, that, judging
their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more
barbarity in eating a man while he is alive than in eating him dead; and in
tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting
a man bit by bit, in having him mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not
only read but seen within fresh memory, not among ancient enemies, but among
neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the pretext of piety
and religion), than in roasting and eating him after he is dead."
Montaigne thus offers us the knowledge
necessary to let us settle into the shoes of these Brazilian noble
savages, and to generate commentary on our own society (late 16th century France) by means of his description
of their customs. He pushes us with his authorial comments as Reggio will push
us in his own way with Native Americans in Koyaanisqatsi. But if that
is not enough, at the end of the essay he refers to three of the noble savages
who came to Europe and met Charles IX at Rouen. Montaigne purports to tell us
their comments on the French court. They were astonished that healthy, strong,
grown men should have submitted to be ruled by a child king, and that rich people
allowed poor people to go on begging and that the poor did not rise up and kill
the rich for making them endure injustice. Montaigne leads us to question the
ideas of hereditary monarchy and societally fixed rules of property rights which
fly in the face of equity. We don't need to become socialists to see that Montaigne
is trying to get his readers to think, and by offering two specimens of what
Europeans of his day did without giving it a second thought, he is also prompting
his readers to reconsider a great deal more. Europe and France are the subject
of the essay; the cannibals are a foil.
When I teach Montaigne I always bring
Koyaanisqatsi in to show my students that these ideas are not only
alive but current and relevant; and that while the film may contain a heavy-handed
message, it is an exciting and new way of approaching a very old problem.
The Montaigne passages are from Donald
Frame's translation in the ubiquitous Norton Anthology of World Literature,
second edition (2002), volume 3 pages 2646 and 2649, respectively.