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MacDonald:
You mentioned that
Los Olvidados
was pivotal for you. The bulk of my research has been into nonnarrative film. Ordinarily, filmmakers who do long nonnarrative films start with short films and work toward larger projects. Am I correct that
Koyaanisqatsi
is your first film?
Reggio:
Yes, it is.
MacDonald:
Between seeing the Buñuel film and making
Koyaanisqatsi,
did you see a lot of nonnarrative film? Did you see Hilary Harris's
Organism
[1975] or other independent films that use time lapse as their central device? Harris has a credit on
Koyaanisqatsi
.
Reggio:
I knew nothing about film before beginning
Koyaanisqatsi
. I tried to turn my zero film literacy into an advantage. As a child I'd seen Randolph Scott movies and stuff like that, and that was the extent of my viewing. As a Brother, I saw a few religious films. I remember that
Monsieur Vincent
[Maurice Cloche, 1947] moved me greatly. But I had no real background, and I felt that that was a unique preparation: I didn't have to unlearn anything to do what I was doing. To be quite candid, Scott, I felt a bit like a blind man having to work through the hands of other people: I didn't know camera equipment or technology, but what I had clear from the beginning was a pre-visualization of what I was concerned with. It was more than a concept; it was a feeling, and what I could feel, I could see.
I did a lot of traveling from the mid sixties through the early seventies to large cities in this country, Canada, and Mexico, and my observations led me to the structure of
Koyaanisqatsi
. My work in the barrio had ceased, but it had led me to media. With three other persons, I formed this media collective [Institute for Regional Education, where my interview with Reggio was recorded], which is now in its nineteenth year. While I didn't make films before
Koyaanisqatsi,
I did make a series of nonverbal public interest spots as part of a large media campaign, sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The campaign dealt with invasions of privacy and the use of technology to control behavior. Rather than use public service announcements, which had no visibility, we bought spots for the period of one month, in all media windowstelevision, newspapers, billboards, radio. For each of the television network affiliates, we had three spots in prime time per night, plus others during the talk shows. These ads were so visible and so popular that the viewing public was calling the station to see what time the next
ad
would be on. The technicians began to throw them in whenever they had an open spot, so we got a lot more than we paid for. We also had over thirty billboards in high traffic-density areas, and radio spots in "drive time." And we wrote a book, but instead of publishing it in the usual way, we inserted it into New Mexico's largest newspaper as a