In Godfrey Reggio's film Koyaanisqatsi, filmgoers in the 1980s entered a world out of control, ready to fly apart from pressure of technology on the human psyche and the natural landscape. Despite this nuclear-age edginess, the film conveyed something more than Luddite fears of technology. Through a careful use of repetition, an integration of image with Philip Glass' hypnotic soundtrack, and the surprise ending that clarifies the film's enigmatic beginning, Reggio prefigures some of the devices we associate with creative hypertext and Web-based multimedia. The talk considers the methods used by Reggio and Glass and the ongoing project of Reggio's to capture, in documentaries without words or plot, the essence of "life out of balance."