Pat O'Neill's rarely screened masterpiece is a moving meditation on industrialization, focusing on Los Angeles, “a city that turned land into desert.” O'Neill conceived the exceptionally dense and technically dazzling film partly as an answer to Godfrey Reggio's travelogue Koyaanisqatsi. Using time-lapse photography and optical printing, O'Neill intertwines technology and ideas, collaging different locales into montages that suggest the inevitable conflict of industry and nature. One slow dissolve between the Owens Valley desert, 260 miles to the north, to downtown Los Angeles at night, suggests a direct cause and effect: the city flourished only by despoiling the land. O'Neill renders people as fleeting shadows whose power to alter the landscape fails to mitigate the fragility and shortness of human life on a geologic scale. His genius comes in combining his raw materials in new and increasingly paradoxical ways, posing the relationship between humans and nature as a series of questions rather than offering fixed answers.-Vancouver Int'l Film Festival, excerpted from articles by Fred Camper in the Chicago Reader