Godfrey Reggio burst upon the film scene in 1982 with
Koyaanisqatsi, one of the most revolutionary documentaries of all
time. Reggio followed up that film with two related films.
Visitors is his latest film, which will street on Blu-ray on June 14
from Cinedigm. Blu-ray.com staff reviewer Jeffrey Kauffman interviewed
Reggio by phone about Reggio's life, work and collaboration with composer
Philip Glass.
If Wikipedia is to be believed (always a debatable proposition), you
have a really fascinating life story which includes everything from
community activism to training as a monk. How did you become interested
in filmmaking?
When I was a Christian Brother, I was working with street gangs in New
Mexico in the sixties. A fellow brother told me he wanted to show me a
film, but we didn't watch films. Films were part of the world, you know, so
we had to get permission, which we did. The film turned out to be Luis
Buñuel's
Los Olvidados, a film about delinquency in the
barrios. It could have been shot in Santa Fe. The viewing of that
film was not entertainment, it was a spiritual experience for me, and I was
so moved I felt gee, whiz, I want to do that.
Did you have any formal training, or did you just jump into it?
I had no formal training. To use an analogy, I remember learning how to
type when I was 12, and they teach you all the things to do, but if you
wanted to type in another manner, you need to unlearn everything you've
been taught. So I was lucky
not going to film school, I just was a
naïve beginner who learned by doing.
So Koyaanisqatsi was your first ever attempt at filmmaking?
Yes, it was.
How did Koyaanisqatsi come into being? Did you have the
concept to begin with, or did it evolve with the filmmaking process?
In 1973-74, my collective did a project with the ACLU on the use of
technology to control behavior, data collection, all the things Snowden is
talking about now. We did a saturation campaign in the southwest market,
billboards, television, radio. We also had a book that was inserted in the
newspaper, it took public opinion up exponentially over the course of a
short time, so of course the politicians jumped into the issues. With that
experience, we tried to take the project national, but it didn't work out for a
number of reasons, so I turned my attention with Ron Fricke to film, and the
film would be trying to somehow give voice to the world. I know that
sounds ridiculous. I look at landscapes as characters, they're very
articulate and have a voice of their own, so I wanted to create a film where
all the background of cinema, things like the second unit, becomes the
foreground. We made the background the foreground. It took seven
years. We were proceeding with what I would call the Braille method. The
shooting was redone, the score was mixed twice, editing was done twice,
all because of insecurity and mistakes. I must say that no one who worked
on the film ever thought it would see the light of day. Remarkably we got
the money to distribute it, and to everyone's amazement, despite incredibly
bad reviews when it came out, the film went on to have a life of its own.
Your The Qatsi Trilogy takes its title from the Hopi
language. Do you have any special connection with the Hopi people?
Only in terms of individuals I knew in Arizona. A friend speaks Hopi, I
wasn't a Hopi devotee as it were, but I wanted to take the subjective
categories of indigenous peoples and apply it to the way we live. I wanted
a word with no cultural baggage. I felt there was more perspicacity in Hopi
than in English.
How did you meet Philip Glass? Were you aware of his music
beforehand, and reached out to him specifically because of the sound he
creates?
Yes, that's exactly what happened. I made almost a six month study with a
composer in Santa Fe who was very fluent in most contemporary
composers all over the world, she gave me a tutorial of all the different
modern composers. My crew wanted me to choose Beethoven, Mozart,
Vivaldi. The first time I heard Philip Glass' music it was as it were music to
my ears. It was immediately, overtly cinematic. It was like the film I was
doing, it had background and foreground going simultaneously. I felt I
couldn't go wrong with his music. To get to him was something else. I had
two friends who introduced me. I wrote, phoned, and he told me "I don't
do film music, I don't do movies." To get me off his back, I set up a
screening and invited Philip, but what I did was show him two pieces we
shot at Four Corners. I put Tomita and Stockhausen music to them, and
then I played a piece from Philip. Philip said, "You know, I think my music is
better." By having him taste his own work in relationship to what I was
putting on the screen, he said "When can we begin?" Of course he like
everyone else assumed the film would never see the light of day, and that
this would be an intellectual exercise of sorts.
I mentioned in my review of Visitors how Glass'
minimalism seems to be a perfect mirror of your own untraditional
"narrative" style. In a lot of historical Western music, tropes like V7
resolving to I seem to be a direct analog to traditional narrative films' use
of conflict and resolution, whereas Glass' music is more of a process,
something that I feel is reflected in your films. Is this something you've
thought about consciously, or is it something that just kind of organically
occurred?
I was aware of it going in, because I didn't want to pin the tail on the
donkey, so to speak. Traditional music can illustrate the image, and I didn't
want that. I wanted something that was connected but on its own track, a
beautiful dancing partner with the image. It didn't tell you what to think. I
felt that because he had an ensemble we could perform this live, which met
with considerable resistance. But then Coppola's
Napoleon came
out, we went to see it with the live orchestra, and everyone agreed it could
be done, and that's how the live performances got started.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger famously championed what they
called "composed film". How do you and Philip go about uniting music with
image? Is anything composed beforehand that you cut the film to?
I do exactly the opposite from Michael Powell. I ask Philip not to write note
one until he has been completely marinated in the methodology, the point
of view, the physical locations and the images we choose for the edit. I
want him to have an original response, I don't want him to just take what I
say. Once we do a dramaturgical shaping of the film, temporal values, the
suggestion of certain instruments, whether the music is up or down, once
he gets that all in place, that's when he starts writing. For
Visitors
he went to see the gorillas in Louisiana in the swamps, for example. He
gets his own charge at a certain point, then he retires and he has to
remember to forget everything I told him so that he can have an original
response. By that time we have a full shaping of the film. He can do
anywhere from five movements in
Visitors to thirteen in
Koyaanisqatsi that always have to add up to one organic whole. I
listen to it on the piano, give him my response, and once we get to a point
that it's working, he'll bring it to my studio and we'll work with it back and
forth. Of course John Cage had the idea that the audience completes the
subject. We don't tell people what to think or feel, people are free to have
their own responses.
Do you think Visitors tells a story? If so, what is it?
No, because these films don't come out of literature. These come out of
stories to behold. One is free to behold whatever they wish. What I give
up in specificity I hope to gain in the aesthetic triplets of sensation, emotion
and perception that are within all of us. All of these films are about another
way of seeing. Those who come to see
Visitors, we all see a
different picture. We all have a different point of view. It's so slow in terms
of its cuts, this film only has 74 cuts, for many it could be a deprogramming
experience, since most of us are on speed in rush hour. It could be trying
for some. With the Blu-ray or DVD, though, one has the opportunity to see
it more than once. There's a great saying in Latin,
quid, quid
recipitur, which means "one receives according to their vessel", and the
way one sees the film on one day may not be the same way one sees it on
another day.
Why did you shoot this film in black and white?
First of all in a two dimensional medium, to give depth to the image, that's
what black and white is all about. Point 2 is precognitive: when you have
color, your eye is scanning the image, it's not your mind, it's your eye, color
attracts the eye. I wanted something as focused as possible. Black and
white is a more emotive medium, it doesn't portend overt representation.
In memory, the less distraction the longer it sticks in the mind.
How did you get the ape to look directly into the camera for so long?
This is a female lowland gorilla, she was 26 when she was filmed. We
filmed in The Bronx Zoo. You obviously can't direct the gorilla. The real King
Kong were all the people coming to see the gorillas. People trying to get
the gorillas to go ballistic. We shot there for three different time periods.
The very last shoot this particular gorilla just looked directly into our camera
for 19 minutes. We were overwhelmed. Whether she was looking at us or
not, she stared right into the lens, so we just let the camera run. What we
did then was take the background out of the image. That took three
months of rotoscoping each hair out, so now the gorilla in the is looking at
you with no background. I chose the face of that gorilla because it was
closest to ours. Also, Loren Eisley the beautiful anthropologist has a great
quote saying "We have not seen ourselves as human beings until we've
been seen through the eyes of another animal. "
Thanks so much for your time, Godfrey.