¡Colores!; 101; Godfrey Reggio: The Qatsi Trilogy; Reggio

I'm going to go up there to go to the floor of the plan here, we're going to have problems with the plan, which we'll get to while we're going to stick it in the floor. Okay, let's put that on the chair thing. I'm going to use an editor to see that if you want to replicate the same kind of billboard, then you get all your billboard through the floor, okay? All right, okay, okay. Where else is it? It's all yours? Okay, it's really nice to have you here today. Glad to be here, thank you. Thank you. It seems real clear to me that there's a deep irony in your use of highly technological medium to reveal the negative impact of technology on human life. That has been a problem for me in terms of, on the one hand, appearing to be very critical of the nature of high technology. On the other hand, using a very sophisticated base of

technological hardware and software to make the films. My intention is to teach people in terms of what they already know. All of us are saturated in media world. It's the only thing we know. So I can't, in a miraculous way, communicate my idea to a person, obviously. And I want to provide an experience for the viewer, so I use these tools. And I use them in a way, almost like a cultural kamikaze. I don't feel invested in the tool, but I feel like if I'm going to try to communicate to the contradiction of a mass audience that I have to use those tools. So I know that I'm walking on a very thin line, and I'm gratuitously and freely embracing that contradiction. It really works well. I use the terms jujitsu in my mind that you were kind of using a technological jujitsu on the medium itself. How have you managed to keep free of Hollywood and that whole

world? Well, there must be obvious to anyone who's seen the films that I'm part of that they're not the most commercial vehicle. They're not films that will make back any norm that's watching for the investors within a six month or a month period. Over a long period of time, they will learn back their investment. But I think that, in a sense, has kept me free of any kind of entanglement from Hollywood. It's also clear to me that my intention is not to become a filmmaker in a traditional sense. I feel possessed as it were by a drive, by a vision, by a concept that I wish to communicate through this medium. And since this is personal, I wish to communicate something, I have to control the means of production. If I worked for Hollywood, I would be a director or whatever, but I would not be controlling the means of production. The people with the money would be. So I produce independently, and that gives me the creative freedom that I need to make these pieces. The

Hollywood environment has always been, in a kind of an odd way, sort of underground, idealistic. And I was wondering if you had a lot of good, personal contact with the artist out there as well. Well, with some people, I do. Less and less artists have an opportunity to work in Hollywood. The way we make hot dogs, the way we make automobiles is the way we make movies. It's an assembly line process. It's based on a formula. It's based on testing, on polls, on demographics. It's based. That's why you'll see so many repeats of different things that have been successful. And what that tends to do is eliminate the very creative forces that could bring vision and creativity to the medium. The medium is controlled by executives, by corporations, and by scientific tools. So I find less and less creative people, not to say that people who work in Hollywood can't be creative, but I'm talking about control of the medium.

People who want to control the medium are individual filmmakers. They probably are more in New Mexico, certainly more in New York, certainly in Minnesota. In Northern California, places where people are not intentionally aiming for the medium, but using the medium as a way to express their own creative thought. And that's a different process. That's exciting. Yeah. Everyone have to put your jacket down. Like they say in broadcast news. Put your jacket down. Okay. Okay. All right. Finding what happens is it's just writing it. Maybe if we sat on the tail of it. Okay. That's impossible. I don't want to do the same thing with you. Okay. Okay. I think it's happening to be as your shoulders is thinking. Did I? You know what I think it's the problem with the tailor. I think it's the problem with my tailor too. Kind of screwed up on it. Okay. The contrast

between Hopi and Hollywood is a problem, obviously. Could you talk to us a little bit about your Hopi worldview? Well, let me say to start with that the ideas for these films, I have to take responsibility for. I can't lay that on the Hopi's. It was doing the beginning of the editing of Koyana Scotsie, that I became, I guess, deeply aware of the Hopis. In that, I became aware of their thought. Not from the point of view of an ethnographic filmmaker or an anthropologist, but from having the, for me, extraordinary opportunity of spending a fair amount of time with an old man named David Menongue, who is now deceased, but was a spiritual leader of the village of Hort Villa in Hopi. What I found was a remarkable confirmation from the point of view of their worldview in terms of what

I was trying to vision or trying to realize as a concept or an experience in these films. So I took it as a confirmation. I also wanted to use titles for these films that in fact had no cultural or etymological or or definitional baggage that surrounded them. You know, our language today is assumptive. We use words in a very efficient way, but the original charge of the word is probably lost. Very few people, if any, have heard of Hopi language in terms of the specificity of its words. Kojana's katsu, usually is confused with a Japanese word in the world market or a Soviet or a Russian word. In fact, it's a word that has no charge. It's like Poa katsu has no charge. Like Nakoi katsu has no charge. What I can do in taking those words with permission from the Hopi is that I can provide an experience of 90 to 100 minutes and iconography if you want

about the power of one word. For love of the word, I've eliminated language in the film because I feel language has become a technology, has become a propaganda, has not, has lost its charge to communicate. So for love of the language, I've eliminated the currency that we use today, the language we use today, in order to allow people to reclaim a word that this film can be an experience about. Who translated the words for you? Well, fundamentally, David Manange was very instrumental. Michael Loatewama, who's also deceased, was very helpful and a German scholar and Flagstaff, whose life work is the Hopi language, named Michael, I'm forgetting his name. Can we go off the camera a second? Okay, I'm sorry. Sorry. I want to get

his name right here. Name just went right out of my head. There's where the silk. Oh, dear, and he's going to see this probably, and he'll be so upset. Oh, okay. I'll try to jump back into it. Sorry about that, guys. The contrast between Hopi and Hollywood is obviously a profound one. Could you talk a little bit about that? Well, let me put it this way. It's not only Hopi and Hollywood, it's Hopi and academic, it's Hopi and modernity. It's Hopi and the modern world. The concepts for the films, for the trilogy, have been my own and my associates. The connection of Hopi was one for us of a very important confirmation that I felt very much confirmed in

my thought about what I was seeing by the metaphysics, if you want, of Hopi. Let me use an analogy. If an anthropologist were to study the Hopis, or to study the Navajos, or the Pueblos, or Indians in this area or anywhere, they would use their own categories of observation in order to render some judgment about the nature of these indigenous societies. What I did was, in effect, take the Hopi category of looking at us as the alien, the inhabitants of modernity, as it were, and applied their categories since they were confirming of my own points of view. In terms of time and space, let's take, for example, in Kojana Scotsi, we see things in a technological sense, in terms of the camera pixelated or in time -lapse shot, so that the image looks very fast. We're actually shooting very slow, the image looks fast. What that does is give us another view of time, another way to see a concept,

perhaps, something that we take for granted. What we were trying to do in Kojana Scotsi is show that we're living in a world that's engulfed in acceleration. So that's a category of observation that the Hopi can view our culture through. It's not something that would occur to us. Hopi also have a sense, an extended sense. We go through a progression of time, past, present, and future, on a very linear way. Everything exists in a moment for Hopi. There's the past, present, and future as an eternal now. Another sense of time altogether. I tried to weave that as a concept in the two films I've done so far. So the reason for choosing these people is that they offered us something that, perhaps, we've not seen because we're too close to. Like we could offer people in the academic world, if we were anthropologists of view of another culture by our categories, I'm trying to look at our world through their categories. One of the obvious

qualities that are missing in these movies is a heavy moral overtone. And for movies with this kind, with the profound kind of message, and the sort of pointedness of your message, is there a heavy moral overtone in Hopi worldview? Well, I can't speak for the whole thing, and so I don't know that. I do feel, essentially, the films I make are moral. I don't feel they're moralistic. I'm not trying to tell someone what to think, or how to think, or point there. Like if you watch a commercial, your head is almost like being guided by the hand of the producer of the commercial, because they want you to see things. I'm trying to leave it as open, so a person can view and see for herself what's being offered in the film, so that they can judge for themselves. It would be like seeing a painting. If there were 30 people in a gallery and looking at a specific painting, there might be 30 different points of view. If 100 people come to see these films in any given night, there could be 100 different points of view, because the viewer is freed to perceive for

herself or himself the nature of the experience that they're having. Why Hopi worldview? What about the Hopi worldview? Well, see, everything that we call normal, they call abnormal. Everything that we call sane, they call insane. That's how I feel. I believe that we live in a world where the moment of the truth is actually the moment of the false, where we are so close to the ordinaryness of daily life that we don't see how crazy life is. In terms of our concept, which is how we live, I think a lot of us feel it. You can see it in attention, you can see it in the conflict, you can see it in people that need to escape life through drugs or through any other form, maybe work, other activities. But what you can tell instinctually is that something is very imbalanced or stressed. And I think the Hopis and other Indians, not just Hopis. Other indigenous people are aware of that. They can see that white people, what they call white people, are people that live in industrial zones or disconnected

from their heart, or disconnected from their head, or living a synthetic life. That's why I chose these prophecies, this inspiration, going to a Hopi source. We don't know their language, it has no baggage for us. I'm in effect trying to create an iconography of a hundred minutes of image in order to give you a view of the power of one word. So for love of the word, I've eliminated language so that we can discover the power and the creation of one word. An Indian friend of mine, who's an architect, said that the American Indian are not a fallen race, are not a fallen people. And I know the Hopis. When you talk about language and the Hopi view of language, in which there are no prepositions,

how does that affect your approach to the visual world? Well that's a difficult question. I don't know the Hopi language, I've been fortunate to know several Hopis very well and I've had the opportunity to have the insight of their metaphysics or their spiritual reality. I can't have their experience, so I can't see these films come from me, not from them. That last answer was so good, we could go up a Hopi. What I like to do is just, you know, if you could just ask them specifically what Koyan is going to do. Okay, we're going to go up a Hopi. Good. The third one. Got it, not Koykatsu. We're running out of time already. Okay. Everyone has a hard time saying these words. I can't say it. Can we do it again? Okay.

Everyone has a hard time saying these words and really knowing what they mean. Could you describe them and find them? What I'm embarked on is a task of trilogy in terms of filmmaking. The first film of the trilogy is Koyanaskatsu. Koyanaskatsu means essentially life out of balance, life disintegrating, crazy life, life in turmoil, but more principally a way of life that calls for another way of living. It's a view of the industrial zone. It's a view of the northern hemisphere and how we live in a process of density, acceleration, mobility, critical mass out of control. Poakatsu is a film that shot principally in the southern hemisphere. Poakatsu means an entity of being that eats consumes the life forces of other beings in order to enhance its own life. What's clearly involved here is black magic. What's clearly involved here is negative transformation through the process of consumption. Wow. So what this film deals with is consuming indigenous

cultures, which make up perhaps 65 % of the world's population through the seduction, through the myth, through the life force of the industrial technological world which Koyanaskatsu tried to show. Nakoykatsu, the third of the trilogy, which is in progress now. Nakoy means war, katsu means life. It's about life as war, but not war in any way limited to the battlefield. War as a way of life. War as the price we pay for the pursuit of our own technological happiness. War as the price we pay for affluence. War as a sanctioned aggression against the forces of life. My God. Powerful stuff. Is there an overarching view that ties all these up? I think so. The motivating concept for the trilogy is the nature of the technological universe or the technological order or the technological milieu in which we live. If I were to say that nuclear war, environmental

devastation, the debt crisis, drug abuse, child abuse, the abuse of women by men at all of these fantastically horrible problems, these problems are surface from my point of view compared to what I'm trying to look at in the trilogy. The focus of the trilogy essentially deals with something as awesome and as unprecedented in certainly our history and certainly the history of the globe as the death of nature. What this trilogy is trying to show is that nature itself is dead in terms in its relation to us as the host of life. Now, when I say that we have environmental devastation, I believe that those things that are destroying the environment can be taken care of by high technology but it would do nothing to eliminate the death of nature as the host of life. And its replacement with the new host of life which is the technological milieu or

the technological order. Now, I realize in saying this to you to the audience that's watching us tonight that I might sound like I've taken leave of my senses. I think the concept is so foreign to the way we perceive the world that we have almost no terms in which to grasp this. Let me give you some example of what I mean or some further comment on it. When I talk about the death of nature and its replacement with the new host of life, that which we live our life on now as the technological milieu, I want to give it some characteristics. It's characterized by being artificial. It's not part of nature per se. It's something it's autophys that we create. Look at any big city as an example. It's characterized by being autonomous in nature, irrespective of our ideas, of our concepts, of our values, and of the workings of the state itself, the nation itself. It has

an autonomous nature. It's what Mary Shelley was talking about in her book Frankenstein, not Hollywood's version. In being autonomous, it also acts like nature. It's a closed circuit. It has a complete universe unto itself and which does not omit a human intervention. So it's a closed system like nature. It replicates nature. It's an autophysive nature. It's also causal, but it's not causal in response to ends. It's the triumph of means over ends. In that sense, it's self -deterministic. It has its own determinism wrapped in. And finally, it's so comprehensive and so total that we have no perspective, usually from which to judge it. So nothing can be viewed in isolation. We can't take care of the environmental problem and assume that everything is going to be fine as many environmentalists would think. Or we

can't take out the population problem or the problem of adverse relation between the sexes or drug abuse or war. All of these things are mutually implicated in the technological milieu that we call life today. What do we do? Well, the first thing is to become aware that we no longer live with nature. We live above nature. Our view of nature is to consume nature. It's to eat nature. Nature is raw material. To go back to the Indians, the Indians have an insight, a wisdom, a metaphysics that is much wiser than ours. They know that the earth itself is a living entity. They know that the earth has a life cycle that is delicate and must be protected. They also know of the danger and the ravaging of the earth against human beings. But they know that there must be some delicate balance respect between these entities. Our problem is that with technology, we've developed an infinite tool that works in a very

finite world. We have a term for that. It's called progress and development. That's our new religion. And it's that that we must be aware of, I feel. When Jacques Eloul speaks of these problems, he says there is no exit. What do we do? Well, there's no exit from this universe as it's described. We're trying the first thing to do. This is an opinion, obviously, because there's no ready -made answer. Is to become aware of the problem that we face, that the problem is not those other fake problems that I mentioned as bad as they are. The second is a process of revisioning. Before there can be activity, there must be a motivating vision. Religion has played that role for human beings. I'm suggesting that the vision that we need for our day is one that is not anthropomorphized. One that doesn't put the human being

man more particularly as the center of the universe. Our Bible tells us this, our Quran tells us this, our religion tells us this. This is something we have to question. Our faiths unquestioned can become our prisons. We have to, in effect, create a new vision. That sees that not only is human being a principle life form upon this host, but the planet itself is a life form. Our Indian brothers and sisters can tell us that well, if we would only listen to them, and that all of the species are a life form. In that triadic, in that three -form relationship of respect for life, we can develop a new vision of life. I could go on. We could decentralize the mechanisms of the nation state, but this is a longer conversation. Okay, we need to wrap this up. It's also nice to be with you. Thank you. Okay, so it will be nice to have you here. Thank

you. It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. So, is this stuff going to be useful to what you wanted? You sure? Just write down the money. I want to do a couple things for the setup of this show. Tom, I just want you to give me basically a medium shot of God for you without Barrett. And when I'd like Barrett you to do, and you to give me a very succinct answer, why are you making these films? Okay. Somehow, give me like, this is TV, you know, that... Why are you making these films? In effect to show people the insanity of ordinary daily living, that the main event, the main crisis, the main insanity of our time is ordinary daily living. And this is the obsession of these films. It's about the oppression of ordinary daily living. Great. I'd like you to just do one more in

technology, and I would like you to make my films. Yeah, actually the questions were prefacing the question and the answer a little bit. Okay, Tom again, what is the answer to the question? You're going to say how's the end place is, you know, is technology the new religion? Okay, well then his question is not going to be on. I could give you some staccato answers on. This is the good one, religion. But what I need you to do is preface the question like, well technology or my films or something. Okay, good. Excellent question. Technology itself is religion. Technology is not this machine or that machine. Technology is the very thing that we worship today. Those things that we worship without question become our prison. We're imprisoned and incarcerated in the technological universe. Yeah. In response to your statement about modern civilization

and where we headed, it must be obvious to anyone who can see that we're headed nowhere. In fact, one could say living today is an opportunity to see the present from the point of view of the past. This is over. This is an indulgence that no longer can be tolerated. The earth will spit us out if we continue this. Great. I'm done. Thank

you. Thank you. Thank

you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank

you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank

you. Thank you.