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From the "People" Archives:
by Erin Torneo (indieWIRE: 09.13.02) -- At 6' 7", filmmaker Godfrey Reggio is a giant with an intellect to match. So it's no surprise that the scope of his work is equally massive: The films of his heralded Qatsi trilogy tackle gargantuan themes like modernization, globalization, and war in spectacular concert with the music of Philip Glass -- all without uttering a single word. Reggio's "Naqoyqatsi" completes a trilogy that includes the previous films "Powaaqatsi" and "Koyaanisqatsi." Like its predecessors, "Naqoyqatsi" is a visual symphony teeming with beauty and assault to Glass' transcendent score, featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma. But had it not been for prominent Hollywood players lending their sway, Reggio's overwhelming films might never make it outside of museums and classrooms. In the case of "Naqoyqatsi," director/producer Steven Soderbergh, who called the film "an explosion of ideas and imagery; a riveting, rigorous, provocative, and breathtaking exploration," became paramount in getting the film finished and into theaters. Taken from the Hopi term meaning "a life of killing each other," "Naqoyqatsi" is both a staggering technical paean (the film used some three and a half terabytes of video storage) of technology itself, as well as an indictment of it: For Reggio, technology's borderless pursuit epitomizes the essence of globalization and its agenda of homogenization. Now, as we stand on the cusp of war with Iraq, "Naqoyqatsi"'s theatrical release is startlingly relevant.
indieWIRE's Erin Torneo spoke with Reggio, who admits he has "never sent an email" in his life, but nonetheless has some powerful things to say about technology's infiltration of our culture, its relationship to power, and the logical conclusions of power-based regimes. The interview may be much longer than our usual story, but Reggio once spent 14 years in contemplative silence, so we think he's got something to say. Miramax releases the film today. indieWIRE: Why don't you start by telling me a little about the overall conception of the trilogy? It could be interesting for the readers to have "Naqoyqatsi" put into context with the rest of the trilogy. Godfrey Reggio: The first film ["Koyaanisqatsi"] deals with the Northern Hemisphere's hyperkinetic industrial technological grid. The second film "Powaaqatsi," deals with cultures of morality, cultures of tradition, of handmade existence -- cultures of simplicity in the southern hemisphere. And "Naqoyaqatsi" of course completes the trilogy and deals with the globalized moment in which we live, where computers, the Internet, where technology is becoming something we no longer use but something we live. The purpose of the trilogy was, in a very limited way, to hold up a mirror to life as it exists in the fast lane. iW: The obvious question that I have to ask then is why choose film -- a guilty part of the acceleration of technology and its ubiquity in modern existence -- for these examinations? Reggio: Well, several reasons. Tragically, our language no longer describes the world in which we live. At the beginning of the 20th century, we had 30,000 languages and principal dialects. Today, we're down to almost 4,000 languages and principal dialects. So, language is being homogenized. The language of the moment or, as it were, the language of the order in which we live, is the image. I felt that if I wanted to commune with the public, I should best do so through the language of image. It's a conscious embrace of a contradiction. iW: But the "picture is worth a thousand words" adage notwithstanding, human instinct seems to want to frame things narratively, be they dreams or news stories or what have you. Have you ever considered putting any of these films in a narrative form? Reggio: Well, not in these films, but I do an awful amount of lectures so I get a chance to blow out a lot of hot air, to put out a lot of saliva [laughs]. That's not to say that I couldn't do something in the future if I have one that would require a more traditional approach. But having said that, I feel the form of film has fundamentally been captured by theatrical presentation -- so I do try to take out all of the foreground of that tradition -- characterization, plot, acting -- and go with what's normally called the background or the mise-en-scene, or the second unit, and make that the foreground. Now having said that, I realize that releasing a film in the real world is like trying to get General Motors to release a handmade car. I consider it to be an anomaly to be able to make a film without actors. When you do that you're relegated to a museum, or to a gallery or to a cinematheque and that's about the end of it. iW: Exactly. The Qatsi films have thus far been museum and film school fare -- I actually wrote one of my first papers as an undergrad on "Koyaanisqatsi" -- but Miramax is releasing this. What do you hope for with this theatrical release? Reggio: I don't think this will be an easy film to sell, I think it's courageous of Harvey Weinstein to allow a film like this to go through a traditional company -- albeit independent. Most of the independent films that he releases, all of those were characterization plots -- they had the normality of theatrical films. This is like a freak show, it's like a cat that barks. It's remarkable that a bottom-line business would risk the investment they put into it. iW: Well, you've also had a hand from two directors in particular who can easily navigate the Hollywood machine and the independent world: Steven Soderbergh with this film, and Francis Ford Coppola with "Koyaanisqatsi." Can you elaborate on your relationship with them? Reggio: I feel very fortunate in the case of both Francis Coppola and George Lucas, and now Steven Soderbergh, who in all cases came to me. That's not to say that they were knocking my doors down, [laughs] butFrancis happened to drop into the big room at Goldwyn Studios in 1981 (I was using the big room for "Koyaanisqatsi" at weird hours because it was cheaper) and said that he would like to do everything possible to make this available to the public, so he put his name on it In fact most people who saw that film certainly must have had the thought that it was a Francis Coppola film because Francis is like part of the pantheon at this point. Same thing with Lucas: he asked to be part of the "Powaaqatsi" presentation. Again, I was highly honored. His excellent advice to me at that time was "don't worry about distribution, Godfrey. That'll be something for the future. Make this film and that'll be your success." In the case of Steven Soderbergh, in March of 2000, BAM in New York [Brooklyn Academy of Music] played some of my films with Phillip Glass. The New York Times did a considerable write-up about the Qatsi. project and "< I got a call from Soderbergh's producer, who said he would like to set up a meeting with Steven. Soderbergh and his agent arranged the financing with Miramax, in particular with Harvey Weinstein. iW: I'd like to get into your process a little bit. How much did you shoot vs. use of stock images? Reggio: We went on location to shoot "Koyannisqatsi" and "Powaqqatsi." "Naqoyqatsi" is 100 percent original photography, but it's a little bit tricky: Because of the subject matter -- "Naqoyqatsi" has to do with globalization, technology, the world of virtuality -- I felt it was very important that the location be commensurate with the subject matter. So the location for this film is the images themselves -- what is traditionally called stock and archival images. Then we animated those images. So we looked at the hyper-real world by creating images and we deliberately chose images that people have seen before in commercials, on news, in historical docs, in scientific, educational, and computer libraries. Images that were ubiquitous, iconic, or familiar, and we tried to reshuffle those, repaint them, layer them. Every image in "Naqoyqatsi" has been affected, manipulated, stretched, the grain messed with. In some cases, 25 to 30 layers just to get one image. If there's any beauty at all, it's very tortured, belabored beauty. iW: Were you already familiar with the technology that was going to be used or did you actually do any of the computer manipulation yourself? Reggio: No, I never sent an e-mail in my life! iW: I was wondering Reggio: The only thing I can do is type. I learned that when I was 13. I don't want to say that constitutionally or morally I'm against it. It's just thatI'm sounding like I'm out of my hat here, it's not interesting for me and so I haven't pursued it. That's true for the little career I've had in film. It's true for everything I've done. In effect, I feel like a blind, deaf, and illiterate person working through the sensibilities and multiple, real talents of other people. Everything I do is collaborative. My job is to assemble this team of collaboration, hope that everyone has a strong ego but no vanity and that we can proceed with a critical path. But I do write extensively. I write what I call dramaturgical shapings for the film.
Those that wished to join the "Naqoyqatsi" staff -- mostly young people highly fluent in digital formats -- had to be willing to go through an extremely rigorous and highly disciplined first three months. In effect, we live together for three months non-stop, unrelenting, building up a point of focus based on this scenario. That scenario became the basis for developing the internal network of computers that we strapped together, the basis of the nomenclature for the computer program that we put together to have everyone working on the same page. So it was a very intense yet very enthusiastic opportunity for all of us. All of them, myself included got paid only documentary wages, so money was not a motivation. Everybody there probably could have earned a lot more money -- with the exception of myself -- and they were there for the love the project. And this was a solid 18 months, two years for some of us. iW: And how many people were on this project? Reggio: I had a base crew between 22 and 25 in the Qatsi studio on Broadway south of Canal. Philip [Glass] also has a crew of that many. And there were people who came into do shoots and special set-ups, so there're hundreds of people who worked on the film at the end of the day. iW: What computer programs were you using to do the manipulation? Reggio: We used the basic Avid system, set in 3 to 1 compression. Then we used a Symphony system, which was at one-to-one where we did the final cut. We did all of the pre-cutting of the visual language -- we didn't receive dubs from the houses that we bought footage from. They trusted us to use masters, so in that way we could actually be doing real things and not have to repeat it all. Once we got through that platform, we went into a symphony and then from symphony we went to the Henry or the iQ, which is called the High Definition equivalent. So it was three very sophisticated digital systems. Remember that the film is about the digital domain. From the point of view of the scenario, images are evil demons, if I can be so bold. iW: Right, that's why I'm wondering if any of the companies, you said that they trusted you with the masters, they must have been familiar with your work and your perspective on mass consumerism and commercial culture... Reggio: These films however, have ambiguity built into them, because it's too easy in film to make a strident work of propaganda or advertising, which are really the same thing anyway, meaning the message is unmistakable. I'm not interested in having an unmistakable message because if everyone got it, that act itself would be fascistic. "Naqoyqatsi" is about how the unity of the world is held together by technological homogenizations. The price we pay for that would not only be human suffering but losing what it means to be human-- a being with a nature that functions through a language form. iW: Do you see benefits from technological progress? Reggio: There are obvious benefits -- medical or educational. Buckminster Fuller, one of the prophets of the technological order, used all the metaphors like "spaceship earth" and it was his basic point of view that prevailed that said technology is neutral. It's use or misuse that you make of it. So, of course America makes good use of it, Saddam Hussein makes bad use or the Al-Qaeda makes bad use, and the UK makes good use, well that to me is ridiculous. Technology is not neutral. All tools have intrinsic politics and technology is the tool of now. It's not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It's that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life. We are now cyborged, that's not the future, that is the present. Now, that's a hard sell, believe me. It's not a popular point of view. iW: Well perhaps because there's a sense of inevitability in your films, and I think people don't want to accept that. Because what you're telling me is that we're already there, it's not a warning Reggio: That's what I meant about holding a mirror up to society. I think there's an enormous value to being negative. The world we live in today, negativity is not permitted iW: No, it's medicated away Reggio: Yeah, we want to have the shiny view on everything. But in fact if you look at film as a metaphor, only through the negative can you have the positive print. What I'm trying to get to is the positive value of negation. I think it's the tragedy of our time that we're not aware of the affect of the manner in which we've adopted tools. Those tools have become who we are. iW: Do people call you a doomsday prophet? Reggio: I've been called that or a very negative person: "You better take a pill if you go see Godfrey's films, they're pretty dark." What I'm trying to do is to at least raise a flag to the blinding light of technology. Homer said, "Ah, fire, their brilliance, their flaw. Is this the moment of the sunset or the moment of the dawn?" They weren't shrinking from tragedy or from humor. If it could help you sense the moment you were in, it had a very positive value. It wasn't to depress, it was to purge. Now, this all heavy stuff you realize isn't stuff I demand from my crew. [laughs] iW: Because the theme of "Naqoyqatsi" is civilized violence or a life of war, I'd like to ask you to comment about the time we're in right now, with eminent war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and your own studio having been located south of Canal Reggio: Right on the ninth ring outside the bull's eye. As hard as this is going to be to say, I think the events of 9/11, the events that are happening in Israel right now, in Palestine, the events in the Middle East, in South East Asia, in Africa, which we all neglect, and Latin America, and now coming to our shores are the ongoing, logical conclusions of the way of life based on power. For me, nation-states are the first technology. They homogenize language, develop mother-tongues, become father-lands. They think only of their own interest. And power becomes the arbitrator of what is good and bad. It's curious to me that the gods of the conquered become the demons of the conquerors. History has been the history of warfare. | |
