The 1939 Documentary that Predates Koyaanisqatsi by 43 Years, Scored by Aaron Copland
From the YouTube notes:
I’ve been reading a book called The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross. There’s a section about music in the 1930’s where Ross describes the film score for a film documentary titled The City. He describes, “A sequence depicting the congestion of the city inspires vamping repetitive music that anticipates the minimalism of Philip Glass. Koyaanisqatsi, Glass’s film symphony about the ruination of the planet is essentially an update of The City.”
As a fan of Koyaanisqatsi and Philip Glass, I naturally had to seek out the 1939 documentary. And indeed The City does have many similarities to Koyaanisqatsi which was made 44 years later. But there were a couple problems. First, the music recording was low quality. Second, there is a narrator who, despite reading the words of the influential Lewis Mumford, gets in the way of the music and visuals of The City.
What makes Koyaanisqatsi so powerful is that it doesn’t need a preachy voiceover to make its point. So before I knew it, I was tracking down a better performance of Copland’s music and editing the original video to make it more “Koyaanisqatsi-esque.” I stripped out about 10 minutes, cutting the length from 43 minutes to 23 minutes to fit Copland’s score length.
To maintain the story I reordered some of the clips, especially in the sections where the music transitions between movements. As far as I could find, the music for The City wasn’t fully published and I could only find one recording. It was performed by Jonathan Sheffer leading the Eos Orchestra, taken from an album called Celluloid Copland. That’s the music I used for my edit although I did reuse about 2 minutes of audio from the original film in the city section where a boy hits a ball through a window, a car rear ends another car, and a collage of phone calls fills the city.
Since I can’t resist a good pun, I titled this video “Copland-isqatsi” as a tribute to both Aaron Copland and Philip Glass. With that, here is my edit of The City, remixed to be more like Koyaanisqatsi. I hope you enjoy it. To be sure that I give credit where it is due, I should mention that The City was directed by Ralph Steiner and Willard van Dyke. Koyaanisqatsi was directed by Godfrey Reggio. My edit is shared under the assumption of fair use for the purpose of criticism, comment, education, and research.
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