Third one up... David Sarrett's take on GODFREY REGGIO.
--Raymond
******
Godfrey Reggio
By David Sarrett
There are
things around all of us that are hidden in plain sight. Things that are so
present, normal, and ordinary that we do not see them for the intensity that
they are. Reggio takes these things and
stares at them at length until they become strange. This is the thread that sews Reggio’s work
together in a cohesive approach to what has been branded as experimental
documentaries.
Born March
29, 1939 in New Orleans, Louisiana, Reggio was brought up in a traditional
catholic family, in a catholic city, and attended Mater Dolorosa School (Spanish
for Mother of Sorrows) through 8th grade. At age fourteen, on his own volition, against
his parents’ wishes but with their approval, Reggio left home and joined the
Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic pontifical order and a self-sufficient
community of 140 monks that make their own food and clothes, care for their sick,
and bury their dead. Reggio spent fourteen years living with the Christian
Brothers in what he considered a middle ages culture. This way of living was intense, rigorous and
purposeful, and it had a demanding routine. Although Reggio openly admits that this was
not a monastery of total silence, he spent much of his time in silence,
fasting, and prayer. An intended lifer, Reggio
took his final vows at age 25. Akin to a
male nun, Reggio, with a humble point of view, became a teacher while also
servicing the poor. He taught grade
school, secondary school, and college. (IMDB)
Reggio was introduced to “Los
Olvidados”, a film by Luis Bunuel about poor children in Mexico. This film was a spiritual experience for Reggio.
Its ambience and ethos produced a story beyond entertainment that touched Reggio’s
soul. He watched it with his students over one hundred times, and this film
became their bible. It inspired Reggio
to think about cinema as a poetic medium to inflict people with feeling about the
world we live in. (CivilNet TV)
The Pope at the time was Pope John
XXIII, who once said, “Question everything, accept nothing, including the
structure of the church.” This became Reggio’s
marching orders, which would subsequently get him into trouble. While there
were not many poor children at his school, they did lurk just outside the
community in gangs. In 1963 he co-founded Young Citizens for Action, a
community organization project that aided juveniles among the street gangs in
Santa Fe, New Mexico. This work was not in the interest of the Christian
Brothers, and Reggio was asked to leave at the age of 28. (Singularityweblog)
Reggio now saw the world with a new
perspective, as an outsider looking in, stepping in, and being surrounded by it
all. Reggio has said that being in the
church is like being in an exoteric form of religion. Being in the religious order is like being in
an esoteric form of religion in that it is more concentrated and more about the
pursuit of perfection as opposed to the attainment. Reggio goes on to say that, as a young monk
the focus of intellectual attention was the love of the word. The word is currently in a vast state of
humiliation. The word no longer
describes the world in which we live.
This is a conundrum for Reggio because we see the world through
language. There is beauty in that we
have different languages to describe our world.
It is tragic that we are losing our languages. At the beginning of the twentieth century we
had arguably 1.7 billion people on the planet speaking 35,000 different
languages and principal dialects. Today
there are seven billion people speaking in the vicinity of four thousand
languages. This is an inverse
relationship. Inverse relationships are a
concept Reggio likes to examine. The
study of ethnology at a University involves people of developed cultures
putting subjective categories on indigenous people. Reggio reverses this by taking indigenous
people and putting their subjective categories on a progressive culture. He demonstrates this perspective through the
lens. Take the Napoleonic statement “A picture is worth a thousand words”, and
turn it on its head. Take a thousand
pictures and summarize it in one word.
That’s how Reggio conceived the title of his first film, Koyaanisqatsi. (Singularityweblog)
Koyaanisqatsi
is the first of a trilogy of “qatsi” speechless narrations. The name is a
compound word that comes from the Hopi Indian language. Qatsi means “life”. Any word that predicates it furthers it’s
meaning. Koyaanis means “out of
balance”. The trilogy consists of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi.
Defined as “Life out of Balance”, “Life in Transformation”, and “Life as War”
respectively. Reggio considers it a Meta language, a poetic language. Not of word. It is pictorial and non-mental in that it is
aimed at the solar plexus to give the viewer a feeling. This experience is visceral. All of Reggio’s films can be considered
impossible to categorize in the measure that they do not have something that
precedes it as a point of view. This is
why they aren’t traditional documentary films because Reggio is not trying to
explicate his point of view. He is not a propagandist. (CivilNet TV) His films
were done as a collaborative form with Ron Fricke as the cinematographer and
Philip Glass doing the unique score full of arpeggios, pipe organs and synths.
Ron Fricke was heavily influenced by this project as witnessed in his own
release of Baraka in 1992.
Reggio explains that the qatsi
trilogy was conceived as incomplete with the audience completing the
subject. “It isn’t a story to be told,
it’s a story to behold.” He wanted to
get away from the linear landscape of cinema avoiding screenplay, narration,
actors, story and plot. What is left is
motor speed, lenses, movement or stillness of camera, color, lack of color, and
veracity of image. Image is ubiquitous. (CivilNet
TV) What Reggio saw hidden in plain sight all around was technology. “The purpose of Koyaanisqatsi is to enter the vascular structure of the beast. The beast is global communication, that which
fulfills all of our technological desires.
This beast is the price we pay for the pursuit of those desires.”
(Singularityweblog) This idea is portrayed first in Koyaanisqatsi with the camera focused on the Northern Hemisphere
bouncing between untouched nature and human beings’ increasing dependence on
technology. Simply put, Koyaanisqatsi shows a way of life that
calls for another way of living. His
second film, Powaqqatsi, created five
years later, focuses on third world nations in the Southern Hemisphere. Forgoing the sped-up aesthetic of the first
film, a meditative slow motion technique is used to portray the beauty in those
areas of the planet and how cultures are being eroded as their environments are
taken over by industry. The third film
in the trilogy, Naqoyqatsi, tells of
a world that has completed the transition from the natural to the artificial,
from Old World to New World. (IRE)
Three decades after his debut,
Reggio completed his latest feature, Visitors.
Whereas Koyaanisqatsi has 384 cuts, Powaqqatsi has exactly one hundred more
at 484 cuts, and Naqoyqatsi has 565
cuts; Visitors has only seventy-four
cuts. Despite the differences in the
number of cuts, each of these films is around 90 minutes in length. With vastly fewer cuts than
the previous films, Visitors pushes
the viewer into a deprogramming, a forced slowing of our senses. Reggio equates his filmmaking to churning
butter, which he did as a child in the 1940s.
It’s a lengthy rigorous repetitive process, which consistently improves
the product. He continues to use the
same subject, and keeping the film as his medium, he increasingly becomes more
focused. Visitors is shot digitally in 4K resolution in Black and White and
infrared only. 4K allows more organic
material to be on the screen. All
subjects are against an all black background, otherwise referred to as
“black-ground”. This black-ground gives
an illusion of dimensionality. Visitors is meant to put a mirror on the
entire planet earth. Without giving away any possible interpretations of the
film, aesthetics are paramount. “Color
contemporizes”, Reggio says. Black and White
elicits more emotion, giving birth to sensation, emotion and perception. When asked about the hypocrisy of using 4K
technologies to portray how technology has corrupted our civilization, Reggio
admits he has a strong negative view in that he is a prisoner like the rest of
us in the global madness we live in called progress and development.
(Singularityweblog)
I think Reggio has bookended his
career wonderfully. As a man in his
seventies, he tours the world still preaching to a younger audience as he
quotes Goethe. “Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, DO IT.” Boldness has
genius, magic and power in it. Trust
yourself and live a non self-conscious life.
He continues that the word “beauty” is derived from the Greek work
“kallos”, which translates “to provoke”. Reggio wants to provoke his audience plain and
simple. Reggio describes a fork in the road that lies before us all; the New
and the Old world. The mantra of New
World is “United We Stand”. The mantra of the Old World is “Divided We
Stand.” The beauty of life is its diversity. Boring is one weather pattern, one
season. One Language is boring. Whereas
the Old World has seasons, the New World has software. Old and New respectively contrast mystery vs.
certainty, stories vs. storage, the Sun vs. energy companies, The Word vs.
digital zeros and ones, interaction vs. mediation. The Old World has breath while the New World
is breathless. (Singularityweblog) Reggio, however, is grateful to be alive and
breathing and considers himself a fortunate refugee who has resurfaced in the
twentieth century. All this
interviewing, speaking, and text splashed on the Internet was not a part of
Reggio’s plan. His conclusion has
persistently been that the highest value of art has no predetermined meaning
but meaning gleaned from the experience of the encounter. Ultimately, it is whatever you make of it.
Works Cited
“Filmmaker
Godfrey Reggio’s Unique View of the World.” CivilNet TV, July 9, 2013. Web.
Dec. 8, 2014
“Godfrey Reggio Biography.” IMDB, 2014. Web.
Dec. 08, 2014
“Criterion Collection Liner Notes.” IRE, 2013.
Web. Dec. 08, 2014.
“Godfrey
Reggio on Singularity 1 on 1: We are in the Cyborg State!” Singularityweblog,
Nov. 11, 2013. Web. Dec. 08, 2014
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