A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

The opportunity to collaborate with Ron Fricke was unique. Ron is a gifted artist and technical designer. He has the rare capacity for brilliant composition and a masterful command of the camera system as a tool. Indeed, any success that

Koyaanisqatsi

enjoys is the result of a fruitful collaboration between Ron, Philip, myself and the provocative and intelligent crew that was assembled for the film: Alton Walpole, Michael Hoenig, Walter Bachauer, Anne Miller, and Dennis Jackob. All of us in our own manner added vital energy.

MacDonald:

At what point did Hilary Harris become involved?

Reggio:

During the editing of the film, which took place in Venice, California, someone called me up one night from New York, very hysterical, and said he had seen a film on channel thirteen in New York: "You gotta check this out immediately!" So I looked at

Organism

and called Hilary.

MacDonald:

This was after you finished shooting?

Reggio:

Well, the shooting never stopped. We had stumbled onto the time-lapse technique in some low-visibility commercial work, and it became clear to me and Ron that this was the language that we were missing. We became focused on time lapse as a way to create the experience of acceleration. So we shot all the way through the editing; we were still shooting in 1982, the year the film was released.

I got a copy of

Organism,

looked at it, and was very pleased. I

felt

that I sawand after conferring with Hilary, I was

sure

that I sawa very different intention in his footage. His intention was to celebrate the city:

Organism

is a celebration of modernity. He had none of the metaphysical concerns that I havethat's no put-down of Hilary; it's only an indication of a different point of view.

Also, Hilary's shots were very short. Now, of course, with time lapse, it might take you a long time to shoot a six-second piece, but I was looking for much longer shots. Though Hilary was willing to sell me footage, most of the footage he had was unusable in our film. I asked if we could employ him to do some of the shooting. He said he would be delighted.

MacDonald:

How much of the New York material is his?

Reggio:

Several of the most powerful pattern shots of people and traffic were shot by Hilary. However, most of the New York shooting was done by Ron Fricke.

MacDonald:

Have you seen Fricke's

Chronos

?

Reggio:

Yes, I have.

MacDonald:

That's another instance of a time-lapse film where the

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metaphysics seem very different from yours. In fact, ideas seem to have been eliminated in

Chronos

. What's left is everything

but

ideas or politics.

Reggio:

It's a triumph of technique, lavishly shot, but perhaps with

out

the presence of an Entity. It ended up as beautiful pictures, as a technical tour de force.

MacDonald:

In

Koyaanisqatsi

you use time lapse more extensively than anyone I know of.

Reggio:

Certainly we didn't pioneer time lapsing; it's been around practically as long as the camera's been around, but it's remained basically a technique for emphasis. By using it as a main drive language, I think

Koyaanisqatsi

picked up on something new. But since

Koyaanisqatsi,

it's inundated the media.

MacDonald:

You've built your approach from the ground up, without extensive experience with other films. Not surprisingly, your films recall the beginnings of cinema, in two ways. One has to do with Muybridge and his idea of motion study: time lapse allows you to do "motion studies" of one kind and slow motion, which is the central device of

Powaqqatsi,

of another kind. Second, your interest in

Powaqqatsi

in going around the world and recording footage of people and places that for a standard audience would be exotic or unusual is reminiscent of early Lumière programs.

Reggio:

Well, I think we're only at the beginning of the potential of the image. I think as we transit even more fully into the language of image, we're going to see more and more exploration of the potential of these tools for doing more than telling a story. Since I didn't want to use dialogue, I had to look at the camera as the paintbrush. In the case of

Koyaanisqatsi,

we were looking at a very accelerated world, a world of density, of critical mass, and I felt that the technique of time lapse would be extremely important in articulating an experience of the subject. In the case of

Powaqqatsi,

we're looking at a world that is intrinsically slow, that lives with the rhythms of nature, that is diversified, that is the opposite of the high kinetic energy of the industrial world. In

Powaqqatsi,