A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

I don't agreeespecially in a context of your films. When you go into a special screening situation, like I-Max, you're psychically prepared for an overwhelming experience, and to some degree, perhaps, you achieve it. When you go into a normal theater, you're prepared for the level of "awesomeness" that the image normally gives you. Since most film centers everything in the middle of the image, you're really not looking at the entire screen. Your films tend to create a larger experience than most 35mm films, as a result.

Reggio:

That's interesting. That offers me something.

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MacDonald:

What's the current state of

Naqoyqatsi

?

Reggio:

We have a concept and a dramaturgical structure. We know how long the film will take to produce and post-produce. In fact, Philip and I have been working on the film since Christmas of 1985, so we're ready to move. I've gotten a third of the money earmarked from European sources, and I'm working with George Lucas, who is the co-executive producer on this film, to interest other sources. My problem is that the box office projections, as a result of the last film, don't add up to six million dollars (my budget for

Naqoygatsi

)though all of us feel that neither film has really been exploited to its full potential. What I am clear and happy about is that the films can have longevity, and are "repeatables"that's an industry term: people can see them more than once, and I think both films will stay around a long time. When the third film is finished, there'll be a trilogy to offer.

MacDonald:

What will the new film be like?

Reggio:

Fifty to seventy percent of the film, assuming I get the images I want, will be stock and archival footage. We'll print that footage; we'll recompose it; we'll cross frame it; we'll do opticals on it; we'll extend or constrict the grain structure; we'll manipulate it. And then we'll shoot the other fifty percent of the film. The principal photography will be the "outside look," seeing the present from the point of view of the past. The stock and archival footage will be the "inside look," the visual vernacular that people's minds, eyes, imaginations are drenched in by virtue of being part of Media World. We'll try to reposition the context of those stock and archival images so they can be looked at in a new way.

Naqoy

means "war";

qatsi

means "life"in its compound: "war as a way of life." But this is not a film about the battlefield. It's a film about sanctioned aggression against the force of life, how we confuse human freedom with our pursuit of technological "happiness'' or material affluence. Essentially, the film will be about the death of naturenot in an ecological sense, though that'll be includedbut the death of nature as the

host of life,

as the place where life is lived, and how it has been replaced with the synthetic world we live in. I think the film will be timely. I hope it will allow us to rename the world we live in, albeit with the very limited resources of a film.

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Peter Watkins

Peter Watkins has been directing films that critique the commercial cinema in general, and television news in particular, since the late fifties. Even in his early "amateur films"as they were called in Englandhe dealt with the issues of war and revolution in unconventional ways. By the time he went to work for the BBC in 1963, Watkins was a recognized talent (

The Diary of an Unknown Soldier,

1959, and

The Forgotten

Faces, 1961, had won "Oscars" in the then-annual Ten Best Amateur Films Competition) with a desire to use film as a means of changing conventional ways of seeing and understanding history and current developments. Watkins's first two directorial projects at the BBC caused considerable controversy. The first of these to be completed was

Culloden

(1964), a dramatization of the final major battle between the Scottish and the British and the subsequent destruction of the Highland Clans as a political force. The film was based on John Prebble's history of the events,

Culloden

(London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), but while

Culloden

is rigorously true to the facts, it in no way conforms to the cinematic forms standard at the timeeven at the BBCfor "recreating" history. For

Culloden

Watkins extended the methods he had explored in the amateur films, especially the use of the camera as part of the action, rather than detached observer, and the reliance on close-ups of characters who look directly at the camera/audience. As the Highlanders look out at the viewers, they defy the conventional limits of history and geography, confronting our tendency to fantasize about the "heroic" past and ignore the problematic connections between past and present.

Watkins's break with convention in

Culloden

resulted in both awards

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