To explain his artistic intentions, the American director Godfrey Reggio employed mythology: “Once a lioness had stillborn cubs. She roared furiously to provoke their hearts back to live. This is to me what a film is about. The audience entering a theatre are stillborn to me. A film has to roar”.

Reggio’s film Koyaanisqatsi roars.

Starting and ending with ancient petroglyphs carved into reddish rocks by Native Americans, the film is a furiously moving train of seemingly unrelated sequences of great visual power.

“My film roars with beauty”, commented Reggio on the sped-up streams of clouds over the breathtaking moonscape of the American West, the majestic Colorado River, the thundering Niagara Falls.

What follows is a stark contrast. Suddenly, we see a soot-covered worker beside a monstrous truck ensconced in oily black smoke, the first sight of human encroachment into nature.

Iron claws rip through the skin of the desert. Explosions. Land bursts open. Hillsides blow out gravel and rocks and dust. The mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb.

Then, another hard cut: a bird’s-eye view of a human landscape where people in time-lapse speed haste like a flurry of ants through city canyons. A rush-hour subway elevator looks eerily like a human waterfall.

There is no narration. Only the minimalist music by Golden Globe winner Philip Glass. The score is urgent, alarming. It is in sync with the staccato of the images. Sometimes the music sounds like an approaching ambulance or the turbulence of a brewing storm.

The constant flow of the music is interspersed with only one distinctive human sound: the hypnotic chant of the word “Koyaanisqatsi”, like a choir of monks announcing the end of all things.

This mantra-like chant and title of the film is a Hopi Indian word with many related meanings: life out of balance, life disintegrating. An emergency that calls for another way of living.

In 1975, director Godfrey Reggio started to capture dramatic natural occurrences to, somehow, combine all his footage into a possible documentary. He was especially fascinated by visual time change, such as slow-motion, but foremost by the use of accelerated motion: slowed-down film exposure leading to hyper speed once projected.

The effect for the viewer is a revelation. The camera glides over bizarre landscapes which are the results of millions of years of erosive natural forces. By comparison, the changes of nature by humans are dizzyingly fast. They are the results of just a few decades.

By 1982, Reggio had combined the highlights of his works like a linear jigsaw puzzle. As much as he could, he had recorded parts of our planet as they have formed prior to the arrival of men. And he also recorded urban life and the technology necessary to keep it functioning.

We see power lines crisscrossing formerly untouched deserts. We observe soulless machinery spitting out mass products. We follow rapid assembly lines that turn the speed of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Life into snail pace.

And we see freeways at night as if they were all-consuming, ever-growing tentacles. We can see the cars coming and going, their front and head lights piercing the dark. Don’t they look like the white and red blood cells of a living organism?

Koyaanisquatsi, the first of the so-called QATSI trilogy, was released 40 years ago – Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi arrived years later.

It was a very early attempt to point out that human activity has serious side effects. Which makes the film a relevant topic on the environmental urgency of today.