“Many of the film critics I’ve talked to see Koyaanisqatsi as a cat that barks,” director Godfrey Reggio told a writer for one magazine shortly after the release of his critically acclaimed film in the early 1980s. “They don’t know what to do with it.” Indeed, writing at the same time, critic Alan Brien pondered this exact thought: “Faced with a film that has an unpronounceable title, no characters and no story, no dialogue and no commentary, where the conventional backgrounds – landscape and city streets, machines and crowds – have advanced to hog the screen, this critic must admit a problem.” While words do often fail to describe Koyaanisqatsi, the film remains a profound, sometimes even prophetic, experience nearly four decades after it was first unveiled to audiences.

Koyaanisqatsi – a Native American word loosely translated as ‘life out of balance’ – was released to great critical success in 1983. A quasi-documentary film combining the experimental cinematography of Ron Fricke with the intense minimalist score of Philip Glass, the core of Koyaanisqatsi is a critique of the modern society and its desecration of the natural world.

It is a careful examination of modern life, in all its poetic ugliness and...