Artisode; 4.1; Godfrey Reggio

You I feel privileged to be a filmmaker because people are at the trough of cinema, religion, whatever your point of view about it is, the new divine is technology as it were. Anything we could have said about God in the past, we can say about miracle macro.

I wanted to, in effect, take that miracle in reverse and use it to try to offer a gift through the medium that everyone is entranciated with that's only present, the screen that one can no longer escape and put something like a mirror or a hammer depending on your point of view through a medium of art out into the real world. Before I do a movie, it's obsessive for me that I have a title. I don't know why, but if I can't name it, I can't feel it. Okay, so that's my real limit. So, of course, I drove myself crazy. I went through a lot of different titles, Savage Eden, The Oracle of Katrina, etc., but what kept, you know, bubbling up inside of me, this is all about perception. I'm not offering you a specific idea.

I'm offering you to observe something that's hidden in plain sight. It's all about seeing. So I said, well, you know, holy smoke, holy terror, holy moly, holy scene. Having come from New Orleans, being away from it, but it being in me, New Orleans just went through a debacle, the likes of which most cities in North America have never experienced, the 2005 Hurricane Katrina. My first impulse as a filmmaker was to get down there and to lens it. I didn't get to shoot for another almost four years since that event.

So the view I had of it actually matured, and I realized that had I gone down in 2005, I would have been shooting the ruins of a hurricane. Big deal, sorry to put it that way, but there are many hurricanes and we see them on the news all the time. What I got to see now, when I went to shoot five years later actually, is not the ruins of a hurricane, but the ruins of modernity. These buildings that became like mausoleums that worked with their windows like choirs, singing deaf songs are an amusement park that hadn't been used for over five years where the swamp was literally reclaiming it through its vegetation and the alligators and snakes.

These were like sets when you think of the ruins of modernity that nowhere in Hollywood could they build. My films are made not about something special, not about a monster other than the monster that we call progress and development, the world in which we live. I also wanted to film in Louisiana the swamps where part of my family comes from, the Echaffalaya basin. And I wanted to film it not in a beautiful color like it could look like National Geo. I wanted to film it in an infrared spectrum beyond color, a spectrum that is present but unperceivable by our senses. All of my films are predicated on seeing in a new way the world in which we live,

which for me is hidden in plain sight, we're blinded. We're not seeing the world we live in or can help us receive that world. Art is a gift. It's not something that is required. There's no need for what I try to offer. No one needs what I'm peddling. It's a gift for those that wish to take it. Art, the beauty of art, is that it has no meaning.

It is a mystery. It can be however extremely meaningful to the viewer. If you've been to a concert, let's say, one doesn't say what is the meaning of this riff of music to your loved one, next to one, say, gee, I was moved, I was touched, I felt it. It could change things in one's life. Portray can do that. A piece of art can change someone. So art has, in that sense, the ability to get ready, inflict itself on the viewer. So that it becomes beyond intellect, something that deals with the complexity of who we are. In that sense, it can be a great motivator to change. To join international organizations to write your congressmen, okay, you can do all of that, but for me, it's a big waste of time.

Your world is your world of relationships. You are empowered to take control of your world, or you'll live in a rooted future, and have maybe satisfactions, but no real, meaningful existence. I feel these films wear a mask of a face within us all. I take myself as the principal subject for all of my films. I take my own mental illness as a state that the world is in. If one does not have the courage to be hopeless about the world in which they live,

then they will never have the courage to be hopeful about creating another world. The world that I'm talking about that for me is hopeless. It's like Humpty Dumties Off the Wall is the rooted future, the future that's already set and determined by the technological way in which we live. To say no to that future, to say no to technological necessity, is the essence of freedom.