Godfrey Reggio

Godfrey Reggio

Godfrey Reggio, The inventor of the visual-art film style which Spirit of Baraka celebrates.
Reggio is prominent in the film world for his QATSI trilogy, essays of visual images and sound which chronicle the destructive impact of the modern world on the environment.

Born in New Orleans in 1940 and raised in southwest Louisiana, Reggio entered the Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic pontifical order, at age 14.
He spent 14 years of his adolescence and early adulthood in fasting, silence, and prayer while studying to be a monk.

With the Qatsi Trilogy, Godfrey Reggio invented his own film style - which puts the emphasis on 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 impact of the modern world over the last few decades.

Reggio' s background is in contemplation (he spent 14 years in silence and prayer, while studying to be a monk) and in service (not only to the environment but to youth, the poor and communities as well).

Born in New Orleans in 1940 and raised in southwest Louisiana, Reggio entered the Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic pontifical order, at age 14 and remained there for 14 years. Based in New Mexico during the sixties, Reggio taught grade school, secondary school and college. In 1963, he co-founded Young Citizens for Action, a community organization project that aided juvenile street gangs. Following this, Reggio co-founded La Clinica de la Gente, a facility that provided medical care to 12,000 community members in Santa Fe, and La Gente, a community organizing project in Northern New Mexico's barrios.

In 1972, Reggio co-founded the Institute for Regional Education in Santa Fe, a non-profit foundation focused on media development, the arts, community organization and research – which was the progenitor for The Qatsi Trilogy. In 1974 and 1975, with funding from the American Civil Liberties Union, Reggio co-organized a multi- media public interest campaign on the invasion of privacy and the use of technology to control behavior.

He then began to develop the idea for a nonverbal film formed from a non-stop collage of images from real life.

Thus started Reggio' s seven-year odyssey to make Koyaanisqatsi, which won acclaim around the world. He next traveled to 12 countries making his second film Powaqqatsi (1987) which shifted his focus from North America to the more remote corners of the planet.

Reggio followed the second Qatsi film with the short film Anima Mundi, which was commissioned by Bulgari, the Italian jewelry company, for the World Wide Fund for Nature which used the film for its Biological Diversity Program. Accompanied by the music of Philip Glass, the twenty-eight minute Anima Mundi is a montage of intimate images of over seventy animal species that celebrates the magnificence and variety of the world's fauna.

In 1993, Reggio was invited to develop a new school of exploration and production in the arts, technology, and mass media being founded by the Benetton Company. Called Fabrica - Future, Presente, it opened in May, 1995, in Treviso, Italy, just outside Venice. While serving as the initial director of the school through 1995, Reggio co-authored the 7 minute film Evidence, which provides another point of view to observe the subtle but profound effects of modern living on children. Reggio is a frequent lecturer on philosophy, technology and film. He resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Films

 

Reggio also co-authored the 7 minute film Evidence which provides another point of view to observe the subtle but profound effects of modern living on children.

Now

Godfrey Reggio is a frequent lecturer on philosophy, technology and film. He resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Check the excellent interviews with Godfrey Reggio on the links page.

Milestones

- Born in New Orleans, Louisiana.
- 1954 At age 14, entered the Christian Brothers order (date approximate).
- Moved to New Mexico to study; began working in the local community.
- 1963 Co-founded Young Citizens for Action, which aided street gangs.
- Was a co-founder of La Cinica de la Gente, which provided medical care to the impoverished of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
- 1968 Asked by the Christian Brothers to go to Rome to work in their order's archives; opted to leave religious life.
- 1972 Was involved in the formation of the Institute for Regional Education, which focused on media development, the arts, community organization and research.
- 1975 Began working on footage that would eventually be incorporated in his debut film.
- 1982 Feature directorial debut, "Koyaanisqatsi"; also produced and co-wrote; used images shot by cinematographer Ron Fricke and a hypnotic score by composer Philip Glass; film released under the banner of "Francis Ford Coppola presents"; title is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance"; first in a proposed trilogy.
- 1988 Co-wrote, co-produced and directed "Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation", again using a Glass score; second in a proposed trilogy; shot between 1985 and 1987.
- 1989 Contributed to the omnibus feature "Songlines".
- 1991 Directed the 28-minute short "Anima Mundi/The Soul of the World" (released in the USA in 1993); again featured a score by Philip Glass; film was commissioned by the Bulgari jewelry company and made with the cooperation of the World Wide Fund for Nature.
- 1993 Invited by Benetton to develop a school of exploration and production of the arts, technology and mass media in Treviso, Italy; served two-years as director of the school.
- 1994 Shot the eight-minute short "Evidence", about the relationship between children and television.
- 2002 Completed his trilogy with "Naqoyqatsi", looking at technology and the world.

Interviews

An Interview with Godfrey Reggio, taken from Satya

Godfrey Reggio wowed critics and audiences 20 years ago with the groundbreaking film, Koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi word roughly meaning “life out of balance.” Through images accompanied with music composed by Philip Glass, Koyaanisqatsi creates a wordless experience of modern life in North America, showing both its natural beauty and our growing dependence on technology, and clashes between the two. 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. Some viewers praised Koyaanisqatsi as an ode to technology, while others applauded it as an environmentalist commentary.

Reggio and Glass followed in 1988 with Powaqqatsi, “life in transformation,” which examines the effects our technology-centered lives have had on the South. It opens with a haunting sequence of a large gold mining operation in Brazil—thousands upon thousands of men haul heavy sacks of dirt up a steep incline like ants on an anthill. Last year, Reggio completed the “Qatsi Trilogy” with Naqoyqatsi or “life as war,” a startling look at the chronic, often violent struggle between humans and technology, and the effects it has on the planet. To celebrate the magnificence and variety of animals, Reggio created Anima Mundi, a 30 minute-long montage of over 70 animal species. And in the mid-70s, with funding from the American Civil Liberties Union, Reggio co-organized a multi-media public interest campaign on the invasion of privacy and the use of technology to control behavior.

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 was 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 60s—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 a hundred people that see this film in a theater at any given time, then there could be a hundred different points of view about it.

Let’s say if I somehow had “The Truth,” and it was applicable to everyone, the very act of giving it to everyone would, for me, be a fascistic act. It is very easy to make clear what you want a film to say, but I did not wish to engage in overt propaganda, even for the right cause. 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 world or “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-70s, you worked on a multi-media “Privacy Campaign” to educate the public about the invasion of privacy. Can you talk about that and what your thoughts are on privacy and technology today?
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 behavior 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 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.

For me, these things are unsayable because they’re so present that we don’t have any distance from which to observe. The problems of social inequity, of war, of environmental devastation, are the ongoing and logical conclusions of a way of life unexamined. So to hope to be able to have peace, to be able to have justice and environmental balance, are consequences of our behavior, not just our intentions. I think it’s naïve to pray for world peace if we’re not going to change the form in which we live.

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.

A lot of our readers will already be at that point. For example, many are aware that the golden arches are a symbol of unimaginable animal suffering; that behind a ream of paper is a web of destruction; and the reality of many diamonds is not at all glamorous. Many become burned-out and overwhelmed, feeling that just living by example isn’t enough. Once consciousness is raised, what do they do with that knowledge?
To tell someone what to do with it is for me counterproductive. I don’t believe that you can tell anyone what the truth is. As enormous as the challenges are, I think they ring clearly the fundamental dialectic of life, where life is full of contradiction. Life is not as simple as this or that, good or evil. Life is this and that. Life is good and evil. It is up to the individual to sort that out. Hope can be the uncreated feature, what is the opportunity for each living person.

So what can people do? As long as people are alive, they have the possibility to be heroic. To me, the nature of being heroic is to have the courage to be hopeless about this world order in order to be hopeful about something else. I’m not a hopeless person by any means. But I am hopeless about this nonhuman order, this technological grid, this pax numericana that all of us live under. To resist that, to rebel against it—the ability to say No is what’s most important.

The greatest tragedy is inertia—the velocity most of us are on. It takes courage to move ourselves off of that line of inertia. This is something for each person, to act outside of necessity, outside of destiny—to act in that dark mucky world of risk, defiance, rebellion. This is not a class for beginners. Life is for those that wish to live, and to do so is to deal with the enormity of the moment in which we live. And that’s where our actions, based on our words, can have the most impact.

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 behavior, when we know that which is oppressing us. That’s our freest moment, as contradictory as that might sound.

Images of space exploration appear prominently in all three of the Qatsi films. Do you have thoughts or hopes about our exploration of space?
No. I think I used it more as a metaphor. It’s like the grand Roman candle on the cake—one grand event that we all point to as one of the singular accomplishments of the technological age. I think we’ve gone to space to conquer it. We’ve gone to space with the idea of raw material and resource to consume for the way of life that we live. We’ve gone for war and for industry. I don’t think we’ve gone to space for truth or for love, or for anything relating to human value.

Everything that we put into space then becomes redoubled into the fabric of the way we live; the same thing was true for the Vietnam war, certainly for the Gulf wars—all of these advances of technology, principally, come out of R & D labs for military and corporate research. These are things that have to do with control and markets, where people are nothing more than numbers; and it translates back into our society as “progress [and] development.” And we’re laying that mantra or religion of progress and development on countless souls, billions of people around the southern hemisphere, and this is at war with their very creative, handmade way of life.

Where do animals and wilderness fit into this? I know that’s a naïve question. But there’s the dichotomy of animals being rendered extinct by our way of life, yet they’re not responsible for the craziness of technology.
Well, they’re being slaughtered. Not just for our tables, but from their very existence. In the last several hundred years, ‘progress and development’ as a way of life has had a bigger impact on the planet than when meteorites hit the planet and eliminated the dinosaurs. It’s a tragedy that’s unspeakable. The same thing has happened with our oceans, with our water, with the very air we breathe.

There is no more wilderness—I think that’s a romantic idea. That sounds pretty terrible. But having said that, I do believe that long after we’re gone, the earth will certainly be here and the animals or other variances that come from evolution will repopulate the earth through this inscrutable process of chance and necessity. For those that relate to evolution (which I don’t completely), one of the principal laws is the law of limit. When a species lives outside of its capacity, then it’s asking to go extinct. The supernova is brightest at the moment of extinction—I would say we’re in a state of supernova right now. The whole world is having to deal with this species that’s only been here for several million years at the most, and we could be flaming out right now. That would be an enormous relief to the creatures we share this planet with because we’re literally eating it up without any concern for the sanctity of life.

 

About the Qatsi trilogy

In 1975, Godfrey Reggio, a man who had spent 14 years as a member of a teaching religious order and devoted his life to community organization, latched onto an idea for a film that would create an entirely new motion picture style. His idea was to grab images from real life - emotional, raw, honest images - and present them in a nonverbal, non-linear fashion, forging a kind of concert cinema.

Seven years later, Reggio's first film, "Koyaanisqatsi" was released to critical acclaim. 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, detached from the natural environment and overwhelmed by technology. In images at once stark and beautiful, assaulting and hypnotizing, the film worked as a kind of visual aperitif to conversations that could last for days or weeks.

During filmmaking, Reggio had invited the daring experimental composer Philip Glass to create a score for "Koyaanisqatsi" that was also to have a great influence on the film's reception -- and to spark a continuing collaboration between the two artists. Glass became an integral part of the film's creation, sitting in on editing sessions to help meld his trademark syncopated rhythms and rapid arpeggios to the images seamlessly.

The film won passionate fans around the world, including Francis Ford Coppola, who lent his name to the film as a presenter. In the 1980s, "Koyaanisqatsi" joined "A Clockwork Orange" and "Eraserhead" at the top of rentals on U.S. college campuses. When broadcast on PBS' "Great Performances" it drew the second-highest over-night rating in the history of the series. The film is also part of the permanent collections of 7 international art institutions including The National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, The Museum of Modern Art and the British Film Institute. The artistic influence of Reggio's style has also been seen extensively in music videos, motion picture cinematography and effects and the IMAX film phenomenon.

Fellow filmmaker George Lucas joined Francis Ford Coppola in presenting the second film in the "Qatsi" series: "Powaqqatsi," which translates to "Life in Transformation." For this new film, Reggio chose to go out into the world, into parts of developing nations rarely seen on screen in any format, and capture the impact of technological progress on native cultures. Over six months, he and his crew journeyed to twelve countries, including India, Egypt, Brazil, Peru, Kenya, Nepal and Nigeria, capturing ordinary people at work and play and revealing their complicated relationship with such new additions to their lives as cars and high-rises. The film drew a wide-range of critical and even political responses - attesting to its ability to touch audiences strongly. In Europe, the film received the 1988 Leonardo de Vinci Award for Best Film and Best Musical Score.

Since their initial release, "Koyaanisqatsi" and "Powaqqatsi" have been in theatrical release in over 60 countries, televised and on home video in over 30 countries, invited to over 70 worldwide film festivals and performed live with the Philip Glass Ensemble. The films have been seen by over 35 million people worldwide.

Each of the "Qatsi" films have utilized their own unique style: "Koyaanisqatsi" used time-lapse photography to bend the mind around its images, while "Powaqqatsi" turned to slow motion to focus on the visceral details of native life. With NAQOYQATSI the series again enters new visual territory, delving into images of advanced technology and digital manipulation with what Godfrey Reggio terms a "re-animated look." Unlike the previous two films, NAQOYQATSI features little location work, but instead uses a method described by Godfrey Reggio as "image as location."

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