Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and the Triumph of Substance

KOYAANISQATSI,
POWAQQATSI,
AND THE TRIUMPH OF SUBSTANCE
A conversation with Godfrey Reggio
By Michael Dare

     If I could send just one film to the stars as a tribute to the beauty and passion of our species and planet, I'd have a hard time choosing between the two films of Godfrey Reggio. They're both masterpieces, affirming and lifegiving, raising the art of film into the stratosphere. The common language of no language makes his films perfectly international; I can't imagine anyone from any country seeing them and not walking away with the same message - that our homeworld is beautiful and giving, that all human beings are equal in the sight of mother earth, that if we take from her more than she's willing to give, we must suffer the consequences.
     When Koyaanisqatsi came out in 1983, it was declared a masterpiece of epic proportions. It was a documentary without narration or any commentary whatsoever, just startling, innovative, and thoughtful juxtapositions of fast and slow motion photography. First time director Godfrey Reggio pulled dozens of rabbits out of the same old hat as he combined breathtaking images of the planet earth with the mantra-like music of Philip Glass. His ambition was not only to redefine what a film could be but to change the viewer's values and provide a new fulcrum for their relationship to their planet. Koyaanisqatsi was as ambitious as film can be, and surprisingly successful.
     His new work, Powaqqatsi, is just as wise and much more masterful; it's subject matter broadened, it's themes less obvious and more profound, it belongs in that rarefied category of cinema, the films of the enlightened. Reggio finds elegance in the mundane and passion in the primitive; he redefines the form with a burning spiritual heart, giving new clarity and ardor to the art of filmmaking. Watching Powaqqatsi is a cleansing experience. It's just images and sound, you've seen the combination a million times before, but never done this wisely or deeply. Since you can read anything you want into it, Powaqqatsi is simply one of the most thought provoking films ever made. I decided it was about the nature of work, burdens, primitive culture, tribal ritual, courage, tenacity, architecture, reflections, agriculture, the food chain, ecology, faith, ceremony, lifeblood, and mother earth just for starters, but you should decide for yourself.
     Comparisons with its predecessor are inevitable, and I actually can't think of any film other than Koyaanisqatsi to compare it to. From the west Indian focus of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi shifts to east Indian. There are less jarring edits and more reflective juxtapositions, with less fast motion and more cross fades, helping it to flow more smoothly from section to section. The emphasis isn't on the clash between technology and mankind but the stronger bond between mankind and his planet. Instead of cutting from the country to the city to make his point, Reggio starts on the most barren outposts of civilization, with long helicopter shots through the most inhospitable wilderness that end on a ragged outcrop of primitive dwellings.
     In Koyaanisqatsi, there were moments of incredible ferocity, pounding music combined with endless machine-gun editing. You sometimes wanted to shout "enough already." In Powaqqatsi, Glass's score is less intense, more symphonic and melodious. The main theme, which starts in 10/4 time then moves on to time signatures unfathomable, is one of the most beautiful and inspiring pieces of music I've ever heard. Like Ravel's Bolero, it seems designed for meditation, as though each tonal range was aimed at a specific chakra. It is pulsating music, sometimes droning but never monotonous, especially when combined with such pensive and inspirational images.
     Reggio is tall, bearded, with a deep resonant voice. His answers were thoughtful and precise, and he would often close his eyes while talking. His background is anything but cinematic. He spent nine years in a Roman Catholic pontifical order, then another eight years doing social work with street gangs. He decided to become a filmmaker in order to raise public consciousness, but I'll let him tell it.

DARE
How on earth did you ever convince anyone to let you make these films?

REGGIO
I started out making a 16mm $40,000 film that I got the money as a contribution from an angel. After the idea for Koyaanisqatsi was in place in 1975, I got very excited about what I had gotten on film with Ron Fricke and other associates. I showed it to the angel and he got excited. We felt if we could do this, we had to do it in 35mm and get it in theaters. We blew it up to a 35mm production. We all grew with the process, since none of us had credibility or had done anything like it before. The backer wasn't interested in maximization of profits, and no one interfered. It was unusual circumstances, it was not something one could count on.
An associate of mine brought over Francis Ford Coppola, who was actually the first one to see the finished film. He saw it, loved it, and brought his whole crew over to see it. He thought the film deserved an audience, so he lent his name to it. A lot of people thought it was a Coppola film, which helped get it seen. It was fantastic. It was a fortunate event. He offered the same for this film, as did George Lucas, whom I hadn't even met at the time.

DARE
How did you find Philip Glass?

REGGIO
When saw I was going to be able to realize the concept of a non-verbal film, I looked at many composers, and of everybody I heard, the best was Philip Glass. I felt it was the most powerful because inside there was a trance rhythm. Critics were very critical of Glass in the '70s, saying he was like a broken needle, but I disagreed. I thought his music wasn't really minimalist but metamorphic in nature, it had the ability to transform. I found out that it's origins were in basic Hindu chant. I had spent years doing Gregorian chant, which has a very similar pulse. Concentration is what brings power, it brings focus, and focus has the power of miracles. Glass's music will allow focus to happen if you get into it, though some people are driven crazy by it.
When I finally got to him, I was very depressed to find out he didn't do films. Luckily, we shared some common friends who set up a screening of a demo tape I had made to his music. He loved it, and from '78 till now we've been collaborators.

DARE
Do you believe film can heal?

REGGIO
Yes I do. Film is trapped in the story, in the narrative, in the dialogue and characterization, it's trapped in the medium of entertainment. I'm sure some of those films can heal, but film can have other modes of expression. Eliminating dialogue and putting in the impact and scope of music can be very touching emotionally. Something can resonate at that base level, inside a person's heart chakra. Film also has the potential to be inspirational, meaning in spiritus, it can inspire, a person can perceive the spirit or entity behind or inside the image. In that sense especially, film can heal.

DARE
Do you aim the film at specific chakras?

REGGIO
No, I don't have that discipline or that point of view, not that I'm against it. My criteria during the writing and the shooting and editing is that an entity or a light has to emerge inside the piece. That it has to stand on it's own much as we have to when we emerge from our mother's womb. It has to be able to inform, to have its own existence, good films generally have that. I consciously look for it. In this case, how to structure an experience. There are three things inside these films, the music, the image, and the viewer. In that triad exists a dynamic relationship that we're looking for. A thousand viewers seeing the film could have a thousand different responses. What you give up in doing that is the overt nature of propaganda or didactic expose, more traditionally the role of documentary. But what you gain is the richness of an experience that portends a state of altered consciousness. It becomes more personal and therefore more profound for the viewer.

DARE
It was rather startling to see a credit for writing come up after the movie. How much of it is actually pre-planned?

REGGIO
It's an act of constant discovery, but there must be a method. In retrospect, I think it would have been better to have said "dramaturgical treatment" by rather than "written by."

DARE
So there is a drama?

REGGIO
Absolutely. If you just shoot from the hip, then you'll get a haphazard result without a point of view, or an essence inside that allows a life to emerge. It also doesn't have the motivation to carry forth as a project. While there's not the specificity of a screenplay, which means characterization, dialogue, or plot, there has to be a point of view, there has to be a concept, there has to be some dramatic element of how you want the film to move, there's even the elements of the traditional beginning, middle, and end.

DARE
But you still discover things in the process?

REGGIO
Absolutely, it's expected and intrinsic to the process. That's why it's more like an artistic project than a formalized screenplay. You start with an idea and you go around once and again and by the thousandth time you're at a point where the concept has become more profound, you know more about it, more has been revealed to you, you've seen more. An example of something that we discovered was one of the opening shots of the man being carried up . About ten meters from us, a man was hit on the head by a huge rock. My first impulse was to rush to the man. When I got there his friends had already picked him up and he was being move up the line. I screamed to the cinematographer get it, get it. Something like that can't be staged.

DARE
How do you decide what speed to shoot something at?

REGGIO
We make those decisions prior to going out to shoot since it involves. It involves the acquisition of equipment. I knew, for example, in the beginning of the film, that I wanted to capture in one moment a drama played out in the life of the world. I wanted a mosaic effect. I thought that using long lenses, which compact and foreshorten the information would be an effective way to do that. Though 24 Frames Per Second is normality in film, I knew that my normality would be somewhere between 36 and 130 FPS. You have an instinct for how to shoot it when you encounter the image. If someone is already walking very slowly, you probably don't want to shoot at 130 FPS, but if there's someone running with a rickshaw in Calcutta, then you say okay, this looks like a good 60 FPS shot. It's a judgement call, so what you have are varying degrees of very fast cinematography that produce a slowdown of image when projected normally. My shooting ratio is about 50 to 1. That seems exceptionally high, but in this case, the high speeds account for a great deal of that.

DARE
Powaqqatsi has a surprising amount of eye contact.

REGGIO
That was purposeful. In almost every case the person being shot was aware we were shooting them. I know it's not a new thought, but I feel that people's faces carry their souls, their characters, their individuality, their essences. The face is particularly articulate. I discovered in shooting that, unlike in industrialized countries, people are not camera conscious. They're not egobound in the same way we are, there's a genuine curiosity, the camera acts as a magnet. They're not showing off for the camera, they're simply observing, as though an alien had arrived in their presence. So the looks on people's faces were their looks, they were not directed. I feel those looks go through the camera straight to the viewer.

DARE
Do you still think of your films as documentaries?

REGGIO
Yes, I think of them in a documentary context, but not as a traditional documentary. When you eliminate the didactic, perhaps it fits into another category. I see them more as experiential. But it's documentary in terms of how the image is taken. When you script a film like this you don't do it in terms of a screenplay, you do it in terms of concept, language, point of view, dramatic reference, but it's a process of engaging an image in which you will learn or your idea will change and you will be so fortunate as to capture something that you couldn't possibly have pre-visualized.

DARE
Why does your film have no language?

REGGIO
It's not that I don't appreciate or feel the significance of words, it's just that language has become a technology. It's no longer the bearer of meaning but covered with cultural baggage so it blinds us to the realities we're dealing with. To produce a piece devoid of language increases the richness of suggestion and effective impact, the ability to concentrate outside of the linear processes of our trained minds, offers the opportunity of a deep inspirational experience. It can make us feel alive.

DARE
How do you think your spiritual background helped prepare you for filmmaking?

REGGIO
I think in every person's life there's a thread. The moments in our life that crystalize are the equivalents of beads, and while they seem to be disassociative at times, in fact one thing leads to and builds on another. I don't think it's a linear progression, it happens more in a spiritual sense. To be specific, in my case I went into my religious community at the age of 14. I had hoped for the opportunity to be intensely idealistic, of leading an absurd life, one that could shun the world, the world being pleasures, gratifications, rewards, attentions, and success, to pursue a more interior life, one of service to other people. I became disenchanted, not with the concept, but with the reality of living in a structure that was more involved with the letter of the law than the spirit. Hence, after taking final vows at the age of 25, I was asked to leave the brotherhood, through mutual agreement, at the age of 28. I felt however that it was a great preparation for my life. Instead of growing up in the '50s as an adolescent, I grew up in the Middle Ages as an adolescent. That can produce abnormalities to be sure. In terms of how it effects the film, my interest is not to pursue a career in the industry but to pursue my own creative capacities as best I can, as limited as they are right now to this medium. I think it gives me a vehicle to express all those absurd notions and points of view that I've absorbed that don't really deal with the wisdom of the world but with the wisdom of another metaphysical or creative dimension that is not particularly Christian but one that comes from my own imaginary star.

DARE
Is your work reactive against the church?

REGGIO
No, I don't think so. I'm not involved in Catholicism any more as a structure. Jesus continues to be a very important figure in my life, especially his spirit and mystical body, but the structure of the church is irrelevant to me. I don't feel reactive, I don't have an ax to grind, I'm not upset about the church, it doesn't bother me. I can be politically analytical about the church without being emotionally upset. The church is not of the spirit, it's of the letter of the law, and that's dangerous. I don't believe we need mediation to approach our source, I think that's a hoax. We have the ability within ourselves to approach our source directly, because, in fact, it's within us.

DARE
So we don't need the church.

REGGIO
I think we need community to celebrate with because we're social beings. So in that sense, the church's role could be one of celebration, but in fact it's become one of maintaining fear, which is certainly not appropriate.

DARE
Has the movie theater become the new church? Is your film a new way of praying?

REGGIO
I hadn't thought of it that way, though I do feel the film has the ability to create, for some people, an atmosphere of inspiration, to put spirit in, to offer spirit. The film industry, which controls the theatrical presentation of film, is an industry, and it has formalized product like automobiles and sausages. In that sense, you're not going to get a lot of inspiration out of a movie house.

DARE
Do you think of your film as political

REGGIO
This film will violate some of the reigning categories of idealogues of the right or the left. In that sense, the film serves a very articulated purpose by acting as a gadfly. Knowing that questions are the mothers of answers, the film is going to stimulate questions to the point, in some cases, of outrage. Some will love it, some will hate it. If it violates the norms of proper thought, for both right and left, then it will have served a very useful and provocative purpose. It's my intention to provoke all those unquestioned assumptions about how we behave and how we think. Both sides continue to promote the illusion of duality. While I come from a leftist perspective, I've never ideologically bought into any system of thinking. I'm more anarchistic. Powaqqatsi doesn't show any system of thinking because I'm not an idealogue.

DARE
Do you think your film offers a new view of the third world?

REGGIO
The term "third world" proceeds from a point of view that I thoroughly reject. The name comes from the industrialized first and second world, the capitalist and socialist blocks. Hence, people have bought into the Truman Doctrine of the Third World being underdeveloped, therefore they have the need to develop. It's salacious form of terminology. These societies are not undeveloped or unprogressive, they're societies of tradition and tenacity that need to develop but without aid, without our pattern, along their own lines.

DARE
Can they develop without technology?

REGGIO
I think so, they have for years, certainly without a sense of industrial technology. Industrial technology has spelt the end of spirit, it has practically eliminated the environment, it has inspired madness beyond anyone's ability to imagine. I can't see that it's going to be used any better by those in the southern hemisphere. You could assume from what I'm saying that I'm being patronizing, that I'm eliminating the so called benefits of progress from those that need them. Those are all loaded terms. I'm not against technology, it means technique, a way of doing something. What I'm questioning is the technique that results from the energy of centralized forms, such as nation/states, corporations, and conglomerates.
Let's take X country with 3.5 million people located somewhere between the U.S. and Columbia. They're devastated by a true monster supported by a superpower. The people throw this guy out, and in the process obliterate their economic system, their agricultural infrastructure, he absconds with the wealth, and abandons them, at least, in charge of the misery he's left them with. They have an unprecedented opportunity, even though they've been through the valley of suffering, to restructure themselves in a manner that would allow the economy to be self reliant, to pursue vehicles of self-sufficiency in terms of their own education and survival. In fact the two superpowers crowd in on this small society and force them to play their game, for whatever reason. They're being forced now to pursue an economy that produces luxury items for sale on liners, they're being forced to arm themselves, to spread this point of view in other lands. In fact, an opportunity for creative restructuring has been all but lost because of the impact of ideas and the actual physical crowding of superpowers.

DARE
I understand that Powaqqatsi is part two of a trilogy.

REGGIO
Yes. Part three will be called Naqoyqatsi. Naqo means war, qatsi means life, so it means a way of life as war. It will be a historical film, co-authored with Philip Glass, thus making a total integration of our capacities. It will try to establish that civilization and it's appendages, empire, Kingdom, and now the local manifestation of nation/state, is intrinsically involved with war. War is not just involved in the overt military activities, but intrinsic to the nature of centralized complex societies, that in fact it provides stability to the society, it gives legitimacy to the nation/state to rule, and if we should ever be hit by peace, we would in fact destabilize society as we know it and we probably wouldn't have a nation/state, we'd probably have to have smaller, decentralized forms. I'm all for the breakdown of nations. The film will also show that peace is a process of war, that countries like Great Britain, since it's founding with the Magna Carta, For every 100 years of existence, it's been at war for 56. That's true for France, Russia, all nation/states. I'll try to show that all of our supposed treasures, progress, modernity, development, all the things we count on, are the result of a warlife. That point of view has been consistent in the entire history of civilization.
It will also try to show that the ideas of African Genesis, Lorenz on aggression, Kubrick's Clockwork Orange and 2001 are really manifestations of the idea, that I totally reject, that inside our nature is written, inescapably, a killer that we inherit from our so called animal ancestors. It's very shoddy biology as far as I'm concerned.

DARE
How can you tell that violence is learned?

REGGIO
I believe in the innate goodness of human beings. If I didn't believe in that, then there would be no hope. Hope is the substance of things to be hoped for. If you can't believe in the goodness of human beings, then we're all part of a massive joke in a slave colony and everything is fucked up and there's no hope. We might as well just rip each other off. I don't believe that. I've seen too many examples of true good behavior. I've seen too much love, too much beauty, to accept that hardship. If it were innate, it would be in all of us. I don't feel violent. I can arise to a moment of anger, anger is an emotion. But I don't feel innately like I'm trying to kill people, I'm not that kind of person and just about everybody I know is not that kind of person. Having worked with street gangs, with kids that are supposed to be animals, most are not that way. I know that there are a few very psychotic people who we need to protect ourselves from, but that's aberration.

DARE
Are you a cinematic cultural therapist?

REGGIO
How about a cultural kamikaze?

Official Koyaanisqatsi Website

Emulsional Problems