Music and Footage

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I've always enjoyed the -Qatsi series of movies: Koyaanisqatsi, Powwaqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi. The way they combine music with documentary footage is enchanting. Basically, the music does not line up with the action in the documentary, which director Godfrey Reggio says creates a space in which we have a place to think. He's absolutely right. By not deliberately timing events in the film with moments in the musical piece, and in removing all or nearly all of the audio from the documentary, we have two streams of information that our minds cannot easily join together with standard sound/action pairs. Because our minds make relations, these streams of information cause us to make connections in ways we have not done so before.

For example, here's part of the "Serra Pelada" scene from Powwaqatsi. The music is a Brazilian samba, but the footage is of miners in the Serra Pelada open-pit gold mine. The miners are there because they believed that they would get more money or possessions from this work than from other work they might have done. But the question we have to ask is... will they really get that promise? There are other questions, but you will have to ask them from seeing this:

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Inspired by that, I did a trio of videos to MC5 songs (posted in the music area), and then ventured to combine other bands with footage. This is Motorhead's "Bomber" with footage of US bombing of North Vietnam in the 1970s:

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I then found a US Army training film from the Vietnam War era title "Search and Destroy". I had to pair up the ending of that film with the Stooges song of the same name. Again, I didn't edit the footage that I found, so any timing that connects with the music is of your mind's own making.

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The last one I did that YouTube didn't pull down (I had one combining Pathe footage of the Hungarian Uprising of 1953 with "The Mob Rules", but the BBC owns the Pathe footage and they didn't let me use it... ) was one that combined Soviet footage of their war in Afghanistan with Megadeth's "Holy Wars". I first used a dramatization for footage, but it just didn't have the same impact as the others. So I looked harder and found what I needed. I had to cut out some of the interview footage in between, but got it to the right length and then put the Megadeth on top of it.