Editor’s Pitch

YouTube is full of people’s passion to re-edit, re-work and re-imagine everything from the mundane to the over-hyped and over-celebrated. Today’s post-production tools are cheap and easy to acquire and the critic in us all makes meddling, be it for fun or artistic purposes, irresistible. This is a totally hypnotic mood piece that will make you see the beauty in even most damp, dirty and dark corners of our world’s greatest cities.


Contains images which some viewers may find disturbing.

Life in Loops is a visual remix of Michael Glawogger’s Megacities. Here experimental artist Timo Novotny employs visual loops and a new soundtrack to refigure Glawogger’s poetic visual essay. So again we see the underbelly of four of the world’s great cities - Mexico City, Mumbai, Tokyo and New York City - but this time with material previously left out of Megacities’ narrative cut.

Music by the DJ Shadow-ish Sofa Surfers underpins this new version and acts as a driving companion to Glawogger’s visuals - often enhancing one’s perception of the superb imagery on offer.

The sheer hypnotic pace of Life In Loops is remarkable. The opening ten minutes alone take us on a whistle-stop tour of New York City at night - via pimps, prostitutes, late night radio call-ins, hustlers, drug pushers and beggars.

Unlike the more reflective original, the intensity that Novotny brings to this re-working makes for a nightmarish rendition of modern life. There are no bourgeois aesthetics here - no parks, open spaces, frivolity or play – no happy families, historical monuments or young lovers - just the iconography and pumping beat of a mechanised urban world.

The tone created conjures up the dark side for many of those living in a city – a kind of helplessness and a sense that they are being pushed and pulled by forces which they can barely control.

Particularly interesting is the kind of cultural juxtaposition Novotny achieves by quick editing between the four settings. In the space of five minutes we flip between beggars in New York, a massively overcrowded train platform in sweltering Mumbai, street children in freezing Moscow, a Tokyo airport, sewer workers in appalling conditions in Mumbai, and a Tokyo smelting works. This creates a powerful impression of continuity as if all cities were themselves suburbs of one place.

Novotny’s take appears to be that we can compare and contrast the superficial differences of cultures all we like, but the business of city living remains essentially the same - whichever city that might be.

Michael Glawogger’s interest was always in the observed, rather than the spoken, and again in this re-mix, the voices of individuals in a collective universe only briefly appear, soon to be lost in the din of cars, industry, and other human voices. In this way a massive sense of scale is created.

Occasionally the film shows a genuinely transcendent moment - the neon majesty of New York City’s night skyline or the sleazy pageantry of a Mexico City Strip joint. But the relief is fleeting.

Life in Loops is a highly effective piece of visual art - more an impressionistic tone poem than Megacities’ symphony. The result is a feeling that many city inhabitants can identify with – unconnected and powerless in the grip of machinery beyond human scale. And yet it also gives the impression that we are not alone and by showing the continuity in all things, makes us question our ideas of “the exotic”.

This is a deeply immersive tableau and good enough to be contrasted with Godfrey Reggio’s rurally-based Koyaanisqatsi. Novotny and Glawogger have offered us the smog-stained urban version.