Godfrey Reggio helped shape the syntax for contemporary commercial advertising, not to mention the music video, with his trilogy of experimental non-narrative films that began with 1983’s Koyaanisqatsi. Reggio’s autodidactic films require users to create their own meaning through the collision of hyperkinetically edited imagery with composer Philip Glass’s evocative music. At 83, Reggio isn’t resting on his laurels—or courting them at all.
After slowing down his rhythm to focus on extended shots trained on human faces in 2013’s Visitors, Reggio’s newest film, Once Within a Time, finds him once again working with more involved edits and compositions. Don’t call it a return to form, though, because he crafted something that looks and sounds quite different. The 52-minute short, co-directed with Jon Kane (who edited 2002’s Naqoyqatsi), conjures the look of Georges Méliès-era, hand-tinted frames while utilizing modern effects to overwhelm the dense frames with information.
That ability to hold techniques from the past and present together in the visual scheme echoes the larger thematic concerns of the piece. In Once Within a Time, children are the vessel to explore how technology shaped the world they inherited—and understand how it imprints itself on them to craft the future. There’s hopefulness and horror packed into Reggio and Kane’s dense work, but it’s on each viewer to determine which they read out of it.
I spoke with Reggio just prior to a full retrospective of all his collaborations with Philip Glass at the Museum of Modern Art. That series gave us an opening to talk about his work at large before diving into the specifics of how he crafted Once Within a Time, from the film’s overarching philosophy to the details of how he constructed each image.
How do you feel about your previous films today?
Well, when they first came out, they were all poo-pooed except for Koyaanisqatsi. Everything gained its own point of view. The whole point of art is other or otherness. You make a film, but if people don’t see it, then you haven’t done what the film is asking you to do. To get it out was the really important event, and now they have a life of their own because they’re autodidactic. They don’t tell you what to think. The ear allows you to see what your eyes can’t see, and vice versa. It’s an aesthetic form that you can see many times, and it depends on your point of view. Please understand that I’m committed, not with grace and gratuity but like to an insane asylum, the films I watch most are my own. Every time I watch them, they’re different.
Except for the Santa Fe International Film Festival—and, of course, I’ve lived in Santa Fe for 60 years—no festival, including Telluride where it was the 40th anniversary of Koyaanisqatsi, wanted the film. Not a one. That made me feel good! They didn’t know how to describe it, or it was only 52 minutes or, and if something is timed only by the machine, then it doesn’t have the chance to be timeless. It’s within the scope of early cinema, and it’s designed to look like early cinema. With MoMA, it’s happening at the same time as the New York Film Festival, which I find ironic and beautiful. To have this film go to MoMA is a clarion call to a lot of young people that are in touch with me from everywhere of the kind of work they want to do. I’m very happy that this is happening. It’s much better than getting an award at a festival somewhere.
Is there something in the handmade, artisanal quality of Once Within a Time that represents a rebellion against technology today?
It’s actually using the technology that makes so many films today but in a completely different manner. There are 412 images in the film constructed of the visual and the aural. Each one of them has about 33 layers of density happening all at the same time. Each of those frames in Once Within a Time is digitally repainted so that they don’t have perfect congruence. You don’t register it, but it registers you. Then the color can change, but that’s a lot of work to pull that off. Otherwise, you press a button and get a digital version, which looks like a digital version. You can’t possibly perceive it all in one screening, but it perceives you because it’s face-to-face.
That’s the intention: to make something that’s like a monad and go where we have not gone before. It uses a three-point play with a prologue and an epilogue. All endings lie in beginnings, so the bookends make a nice ending to it. It’s both linear and nonlinear exactly at the same moment, clear and ambiguous exactly at the same moment. And it leaves you with the question. If you put a frame around something in a museum, everyone conjures a different picture. That’s the beauty of art: It has no meaning. It may, however, be meaningful.
How does it change the autodidactic process when you’re trading on recognizable stories like the Garden of Eden and the Trojan Horse, not to mention familiar faces like Greta Thunberg and Mike Tyson?
It makes it more accessible. These are people that are known, even the model of Mussolini that’s down to the T of how he moved his hand anyway. It’s a lot to take in. I don’t think this film is take-in-able on one screening. You’re talking to the director here, but I think it can be different each time. You go to a museum, and there are people that come every week—or every day, even—to see the same painting because there’s a lot in it. There’s much more in it than you think you put into it because it’s dialogic with someone else. I work on that principle.
The film has a less unadulterated Philip Glass score given how many other sound elements you layer on top of his music. Did that make the collaboration different?
It’s different and the same. I told Philip anything he would play on the piano, maybe we’ll play on an accordion or a calliope. Then we worked out the schemata of where his music would go. Plus, we’ve added children from Sicily in 1968 during Holy Week singing their Italian version of Latin. We took a lot of those [sounds] from the 19th century, things that are in the vernacular. Philip did the composition, and we used some of the music I rejected from a piece that he did for Koyaanisqatsi. It became the music for Façades. Then we added all of these sounds from the orb, thinking of Stockhausen having his work coming down through the space and listening. We have all this sound that sounds like speaking in voices. Some are recognizable, some aren’t. There’s laughter, there’s screaming, and we regard these objects that we’ve been taught in the orthodox way—the tower, the garden, the yellow brick road—in a heterodox way.
The child of today knows this not by study but by experience. A kid today will see more in one day than children who lived in the Middle Ages [did] all their lives. These kids are very hip to it. It’s designed to be a family film and have humor. Baudelaire says that the smile of the Mona Lisa is the stigmata of original sin. It’s a tragedy, and humor opens up the body to receive this blow. It’s not a fairy tale that has a happy ending. It’s a Bardic tale, which has a resolute beginning. It’s done in a manner that it can be seen in Mongolia, Russia, the Philippines, the United States, and anywhere because it doesn’t depend on words.
This is the first time you’ve really “written” a film that has something resembling plot and characters—what effect did that have on the filmmaking process?
I should tell you a backstory. I was affected to come into cinema by Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados. It gave me a spiritual experience because the world he was describing was a world I was inhabiting in the Adobe barrios with dirt streets all over northern New Mexico, Santa Fe in particular. That moved me deeply. What I wanted to make was a film like that about what we were doing. It would have to have a script, but I didn’t want words. I didn’t know how to do it, so I put it aside and started with Koyaanisqatsi, which I’m happy I did. I don’t need to say why, each kid has their own life. They’re like children. This film was played everywhere. On the 27th of September, Michael Riesman takes off to the Middle East, to the Netherlands, to parts of Europe, and back to New York and Chicago, playing Koyaanisqatsi live for the gazillionth time. All of that’s in play. It takes time, but they can’t be stillborn. They have to have their own voice.
Once Within a Time makes explicit a lot of the spiritual undercurrents that are pronounced in Los Olvidados and more on the subtextual level throughout your other films. is that part of the hope you have for the audience?
It’s like the word made flesh, rather than speaking. I just want to explain something: There’s a big difference between what’s linear and what’s narrative. When something is narrative, it’s like following a bouncing ball, it has to make some sense. When it’s linear, as long as you choose a form, you’re free to choose any form you wish. So it doesn’t have to be, “Oh, all of a sudden the kids appeared! They didn’t walk up the stairs in the beginning?” It gives you much more freedom. The aesthetic is both the form and the content, and vice versa. It’s art cinema, really.
Is that part of why you adopted the symphonic structure of the film?
With all the other films, Philip’s music was so complex and beautiful. It was principally a composition by Philip Glass. I needed to, with my crew, take over the score. You do the composition like we do. I asked his permission, and he gave it to me readily. Like Sussan Deyhim, the woman with the crown of roots, you can’t write for her. She’s unwritable. You have to conjure it with her. You have to dance in the room. It sounds crazy, but no one wanted to work with her because she’s difficult. Because you can’t write for her. That was why I loved working with her. She can conjure things that I’ve never heard anybody do.
You’ve referred to doing something called “dramaturgical blocking” with Philip Glass. What does that entail?
I try to write through collaboration. But I choose at the end of the day what my feeling tells me. What I’m talking to you about right now is telling you more about me than what we’re talking about probably. I think everything has a subjectivity to it because everything is in flux. As Heraclitus says, “You can’t step in the same river twice.” So having said that, I write everything out in poems, but then I have it typed out so he and the crew can see it. I’ve done that for all the films except Koyaanisqatsi, which was done on big papers. It took eight months in the room I’m in with Ray Jimenez, my wife Marti, and Michael Goldsmith. It took 16-and-a-half months in Red Hook to produce it with a very young crew, an average age of 27. These people were all willing to believe in the best. If we become ekaggata, one-pointedness, we can walk on water, climb mountains, do everything. That’s what the crew did. They all were possessed. There’s a word, entheos, which means the God within, that we use today for “enthusiasm.” You don’t want somebody who’s drugged out and not capable of being enthusiastic.
Does the number of people needed to create every single shot in the film make this one feel more like the product of a team rather than your own singular mind?
Most films are the work of many people. And when I say each image is constructed, that’s not kidding. It’s not using photography. It’s using special effects, mostly all done on your fucking gizmo because of how much things cost. [Executive producer Steven] Soderbergh got us some good early cameras. We met every day, everything was on the table. Anybody could talk. The best room is always the kitchen in the center of the studio. You can smell the food. I think it accomplished what I wanted to do before I made Koyaanisqatsi.
The film’s final question poses whether this age is the sunset or the dawn, but the final word following the credits belongs to Homer Simpson’s plea for divine mercy from Superman. Was this always intended to close out the film?
It’s a personal thing for me. A friend was a writer for The Simpsons for 25 years, and I went to him because he was the most intelligent comedic writer on the planet as far as I was concerned. He said, “Godfrey, this is really good. I’m sorry, this is the holy grail of silent cinema.” I got excited. That motivated me, and I used that quote at the end: “I’m really not a praying man, but if you’re up there, Superman, please save me.” Homer, the pre-Socratic philosopher, [used] spoken orality, not writing, like a Hopi. It had to change from the Iron to the Copper Age, like now. The world is coming down, and we all agree with old man Homer Simpson.
A lot of your work feels like a prophecy that has come true. Do you feel like a Cassandra looking back at them, especially in the wake of something like A.I. continuing to make life feel out of balance?
That’s a very good question, which I’ve been dealing with for the last few months in interviews. As Soderbergh believes, I believe that Naqoyqatsi is the completion of Koyaanisqatsi. But that film didn’t get a lot of traction. It was called hippiedom or some mad thing on drugs. That was my first collaboration with Steven. Philip felt before we did that this will have its time. Prophecy isn’t of the future—it’s of the future present. It’s Dylan with “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
We now live inside the technology of Naqoyqatsi.
The first film, Koyaanisqatsi, is the hyper-industrial Northern Hemisphere. The second, Powaqqatsi, is the Southern Hemisphere, which we eat to support the North. Naqoyqatsi is the world altogether, all at once. It will find its day, at least I think.
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