Philip Glass and the Philip Glass Ensemble are in town to perform the music of the epic Koyaanisqatsi live at a special screening of the film at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on February 23. With Koyaanisqatsi and the films that followed in the Quatsi Trilogy, visionary director Godfrey Reggio, interviewed here, invented his own film style, bringing audiences images of extraordinary emotional impact and thought-provoking relevance. Part essay, part image-and-music extravaganza, the three films chronicle the rapid evolution and astonishing effect of the modern world over the last few decades. During filmmaking, Reggio invited the experimental composer Philip Glass to create a score for Koyaanisqatsi that was to have a profound influence on the film's reception -- sparking a continuing collaboration between the two artists. Glass became an integral part of the film's creation, sitting in on editing sessions to meld his syncopated rhythms and rapid arpeggios into a groundbreaking fusion of image and music.
Perhaps the most famous sequence is of New York's traffic: sped-up images of cars, cabs and buses streaming up the avenue, stopping at lights while traffic floods across, then stops; pulsating over and over again.
The film's Hopi-language title translates roughly as "life out of balance," and this was Reggio's simple but searing theme, as the film unveiled a vision of an urban society moving at a frenetic pace, overwhelmed by technology and detached from the natural environment. In images at once both stark and beautiful, assaulting and hypnotizing, Koyaanisqatsi creates a wordless experience of modern life in the western hemisphere. The film won passionate fans around the world, including Francis Ford Coppola, who lent his name to it as a presenter.
Interview with Koyaanisqatsi director Godfrey Reggio
You were a monk before you started making films, right?
I was a full-fledged lifer -- I went in at 14, took my final vows at 25 and exited at 28.
Coming from that place of contemplation, what inspired you to start making the Qatsi films?
In the order I was in, each brother takes five vows, one of which is teaching the poor gratuitously. As a young person I was seized by this idea of social justice and I wanted very much to follow my vow of teaching the poor gratuitously. I was told that was not practical or feasible, because how would we run our schools, etc.? But being idealistic, my activities became a problem for my superiors. During the course of this time -- the sixties -- I worked with street gangs, and I saw this great film by Luis Buñuel called Los Olvidados, The Forgotten Ones or The Young and the Damned. This was purely spiritual inspiration. I guess I've seen it 150 times or more because it was constantly requested by gang members -- I remarked to myself that I and so many others could be so moved by [it]. That motivated me to look into cinema in an entirely different kind of way.
Are there certain messages or feelings that you hope people will take with them when they see the Qatsi films?
Having been an educator for so many years I know that all a good teacher can do is set a context, raise questions or enter into a kind of a dialogic relationship with their students. I've made these films deliberately wrapped in ambiguity. I hope they ascend to the level of art. The power of art is its mystery -- the meaning is in the eye of the beholder. So when I make a film I think of it as a "trilectic" relationship of image, music, and the viewer. If there are 100 people that see this film in a theatre at any given time, then there could be 100 different points of view about it.
I wanted to create an experience through the films, something where people could have the freedom of their own response to them. So, not for lack of love of language, but because I feel our language is in an enormous state of humiliation, I decided to make films without words.
Now, having said that, I've taken the famous dictum, "a picture's worth a thousand words," and turned it completely upside down. I try to offer the viewer a thousand pictures to give them the power of one word; in this case from an inscrutable, uncivilized and illiterate language, Hopi, which I think has more wisdom in it than our own language, which has lost its ability to describe the world in which we live. I've chosen words like Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi so that I could use their subjective categories to look at the white people's "civilized" world. In my case, I'm trying to look at this world as if an alien appeared and was trying to make some visual if not emotive sense out of what they encounter.
In the mid-seventies, you worked on a multi-media "privacy campaign" to educate the public about the invasion of privacy.
It was right after the Watergate hearings started. My colleagues [and I] felt that was just the tip of the iceberg, that in fact all Americans had dossiers kept on them by credit agencies and government agencies; and that the technologies developed for the moon [landing] and Vietnam were translated into technology used to control behaviour or to put surveillance on the population. The motto of that campaign, which was done in 1974, was "Ten years and counting" -- we were anticipating of course Orwell's 1984. What we experience now was already solidly in place during that time, it's just that people didn't have much attention for it. Now, it's inescapable. It's lamentable that people accept it as the price we pay for the pursuit of our technological happiness.
What role does technology play in your films?
The main focus of the Qatsi Trilogy, which has been the focus of my work over the last 27 years, has been technology with a big T because, from my point of view, technology is probably the most misunderstood subject in the world. Einstein said "I think the fish will be the last to know water." I don't think it would take much of a stretch of the imagination to say that the modern citizen will be the last to know technology, the reason being that it's no longer something we use, but something we live. The popular myth of neutrality, that technology is "neutral" and it's the use or misuse of it that determines its value, I think is woefully inadequate.
Modern technology was devised, I guess, as a buffer from the ravages of nature, which is at once beautiful and horrible. But instead, it separated us completely from nature to the point that now technology is our new nature -- instead of anima mundi, it's techno mundi. Mystery is gone to the certainty of technological principles. So the real terror, the real aggression against life comes in the form of the pursuit of our technological happiness.
Well, how do we do that?
I strongly believe that our world is our range of relationships, and I believe more in direct experience or direct action as opposed to more generalized committees and international forums. Nothing changes the world more conclusively than the shining light of a good example, and what we can do in our own lives is only limited by the imaginations that we have. We're all capable of walking on water, of moving mountains -- if not literally, certainly metaphorically -- by the actions we take. I try to shield myself from the blinding light, the new sun of technology, [instead] seeking the darkness and ambiguity of a formless world out of which a new form can be created. In that sense, I think the most practical thing we can do is be idealistic.
What have you learned throughout the process of making the Qatsi Trilogy?
I learned that there are an enormous number of people that feel what I've just been talking about, but somehow do not have the words or the ability to describe to themselves what's happening. As a result, we're all walking around, myself included, in an altered state. But I trust that deeper level of instinct. Many people can sense that something is woefully out of balance in the world in which we live. That is encouraging to me. Our finest moment is when we know that which determines our behaviour, when we know that which is oppressing us. That's our freest moment, as contradictory as that might sound.
Godfrey Reggio is a frequent lecturer on philosophy, technology and film. He resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Philip Glass and the Philip Glass Ensemble will be playing the score of Koyaanisqatsi live at a special screening of the movie in Vancouver, presented by International Arts Initaitives at Queen Elizabeth Theatre, February 23 at 8 pm, Ticketmaster.ca or 604-280-4444, www.mundomundo.com This is an edited version of an interview that originally appeared in the August 2003 issue of Satya, a magazine of vegetarianism, environmentalism, animal advocacy and social justice, www.satyamag.com. Reprinted with permission.