A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

[1950]. It was shot in the barrios of Mexico City, though it could have been shot here. Santa Fe isn't a big city, but the barrios are similar. That film touched me deeply, and I used it as a tool to help organize the gangs into a super-family called Young Citizens for Action. I felt if

I

could be touched that deeply by this medium, it was worth exploring.

I don't make films like Buñuel's, but I decided then that if I could imagine the kind of films I wanted to make, I might be able to make themif I wouldn't get mystified by the tools.

The analysis that makes up the metaphysical base for the

Qatsi

Tril-

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ogy came not from academia or from intellectual study, but from reading the sad reality that I was encountering daily for almost nine years working on the streets. I had become frustrated that the

causal

elements of deprivation, disenfranchisement, violenceall of the accoutrements that go with the kind of life I witnessedcame from the overall society, from everything being commoditized and transformed into a spectacle removed from reality. I could see I couldn't create any alleviation of that syndrome, unless I had a broader relationship with the larger society. Of course, I couldn't change the whole society, but I could think about it, I could feel about it, and I could work with the medium that I feel is the language of this timethe image.

The larger society had changedcultures of aurality had given way to cultures of literacy, and more recently, to the culture of image. I realized that if I wanted to communicate to the larger society about the world I was seeingrecognizing that people learn in terms of what they already knowthe most appropriate thing I could do would be to communicate with my audience in the form they had come to accept: film.

I make a critical distinction between Reality and the Truth. I think the

eye

observes Reality; the

word

struggles to name the Truth. I felt that printed language had lost its power, its original charge. That's not to say I don't love language. I feel that we approach the Truth through language. Language is a critical part of what gives us our nature as human beings. But I also felt that for many people language was a technology that had become a use form only, rather than a meaningful form. Consequently, I felt it would be not useful for my purposes to pursue a form of film that centered on dialogue, and that's how I arrived at the idea for the nonverbal structure. I wanted to produce an iconography of image that would provide an experience of reality that could not come by way of English.

I felt differently about what I knew of the Hopi language. There the word had not been devalued. You might say that in my films I reverse the Napoleonic axiom that one picture is worth a thousand words. My ''thousand pictures" are a means of expressing the Truth of the single Hopi words "koyaanisqatsi" and "powaqqatsi." The Hopi in no way motivated the nature of what I was seeing or my visions for the films, but I felt a certain synchronicity with them, in world view. Everything that we call normal, they call abnormal. Everything we call sane, they call insane. Our moment of the Truth, is their moment, of the False. I decided to go to a language that had no cultural baggage and use their subjective categories to observe the world, and by doing that, offer people a way to re-see the world, to revisit their sense of ordinary daily living. So the Trilogy is really a metaphysical effort, an effort to rename the world. In naming something, we can empower ourselves so that we're not controlled by what surrounds us.

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MacDonald:

You mentioned that

Los Olvidados

was pivotal for you. The bulk of my research has been into nonnarrative film. Ordinarily, filmmakers who do long nonnarrative films start with short films and work toward larger projects. Am I correct that

Koyaanisqatsi

is your first film?

Reggio:

Yes, it is.

MacDonald:

Between seeing the Buñuel film and making

Koyaanisqatsi,

did you see a lot of nonnarrative film? Did you see Hilary Harris's

Organism

[1975] or other independent films that use time lapse as their central device? Harris has a credit on

Koyaanisqatsi

.

Reggio:

I knew nothing about film before beginning

Koyaanisqatsi

. I tried to turn my zero film literacy into an advantage. As a child I'd seen Randolph Scott movies and stuff like that, and that was the extent of my viewing. As a Brother, I saw a few religious films. I remember that

Monsieur Vincent