There is much debate now about the role of technology in amplifying inequality. So it was fascinating to go to a "master class" last week by Godfrey Reggio, director of Koyaanisqatsi (1982), the original arty eco-technology film.
Koyaanisqatsi (this is an American Indian word roughly translated as life out of balance), is a poetic film without human characters or narration. But it's mesmerizing for its time-lapse footage, much imitated over the past 30 years, and its riveting score by Philip Glass, which Reggio describes as "ever ascending but never arriving."
Reggio talked about his "watermark," the life experiences that frame his films. His early years in "racist" New Orleans, surrounded by this "ordinary evil," taught him to distrust "normality." He left home at 14 and joined a religious order where he became a Christian monk and learned "to look outwards" and "to believe less is more." Watching Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados tipped him into film.
He is a dazzling speaker of soundbites and its not hard to see why he has a cult following and has been a magnet for other artists - long term collaborators such as Glass, executive producers such as Francis Ford Coppola, and distribution help from Steven Soderbergh. Here are some of the bites from the master class:
“Technology is the environment of life.
We see through the language that we speak – but it doesn’t represent what we see. Language hides things in plain sight.
We are blind to what is present because it is normal. This is the price we pay for technological progress.
We become the environment we live in.
We live in a synthetic order not in nature.
While technology offers comfort and beauty it also is about control.
Freedom as about being able to say no to technology.
In film there is foreground and background. The foreground is the plot and the characters. The background is the context. In my films I take the foreground out.
My locations are the actors so it is critical to have locations that can speak.
I engage the aesthetic triplets: sensation, emotion, perception.
I let the world speak with its own voice.”
The master class marked the US release of Reggio's new film Visitors which I have not seen yet. Thanks to Cinephilia and Beyond plus Indie Wire Playlist, here is a very nice 8 minute video on Reggio, his team, his trio of Qatsi movies and Visitors.