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metaphysics seem very different from yours. In fact, ideas seem to have been eliminated in
Chronos
. What's left is everything
but
ideas or politics.
Reggio:
It's a triumph of technique, lavishly shot, but perhaps with
out
the presence of an Entity. It ended up as beautiful pictures, as a technical tour de force.
MacDonald:
In
Koyaanisqatsi
you use time lapse more extensively than anyone I know of.
Reggio:
Certainly we didn't pioneer time lapsing; it's been around practically as long as the camera's been around, but it's remained basically a technique for emphasis. By using it as a main drive language, I think
Koyaanisqatsi
picked up on something new. But since
Koyaanisqatsi,
it's inundated the media.
MacDonald:
You've built your approach from the ground up, without extensive experience with other films. Not surprisingly, your films recall the beginnings of cinema, in two ways. One has to do with Muybridge and his idea of motion study: time lapse allows you to do "motion studies" of one kind and slow motion, which is the central device of
Powaqqatsi,
of another kind. Second, your interest in
Powaqqatsi
in going around the world and recording footage of people and places that for a standard audience would be exotic or unusual is reminiscent of early Lumière programs.
Reggio:
Well, I think we're only at the beginning of the potential of the image. I think as we transit even more fully into the language of image, we're going to see more and more exploration of the potential of these tools for doing more than telling a story. Since I didn't want to use dialogue, I had to look at the camera as the paintbrush. In the case of
Koyaanisqatsi,
we were looking at a very accelerated world, a world of density, of critical mass, and I felt that the technique of time lapse would be extremely important in articulating an experience of the subject. In the case of
Powaqqatsi,
we're looking at a world that is intrinsically slow, that lives with the rhythms of nature, that is diversified, that is the opposite of the high kinetic energy of the industrial world. In
Powaqqatsi,
the intention was to create a mosaic, a monument, a frozen moment of the simultaneity of life as it existed in one instant around the Southern Hemisphere. We used slow motion, or very fast shooting, as the norm, and long lenses, not to romanticize the subject, but to monumentalize it so that we could look at it from a different point of view. In both
Koyaanisqatsi
and
Powaqqatsi,
the intention was to see the ordinary from an extraordinary perspective. In the case of
Powaqqatsi,
we went out with a sense of style and form that motivated the kinds of equipment we got, the kinds of lenses that we took with us.
I think a lot of people were expecting
Powaqqatsi
to be a
Koyaanisqatsi 2
. I'm very pleased that the films do not repeat each other. Both