Page 390
the music, and there's the viewer, each with a point of view, casting a particular shadow. It's impossible to totally eliminate the sense of didacticism, but I wanted to make the films as pliable and as amorphic as possible. I tried to take the things we see as our glories and turn them on a slight edge. In that sense I feel the film is successful.
As I got into
Koyaanisqatsi,
I started to see more films. This sounds very simplistic, but one of the obvious things I noticed was that in most films the foreground was where the plot and characterization took place, where the screenplay came in, and how you directed the photography. Everything was foreground; background (music included) basically supported characterization and plot. In my films I try to eradicate all the foreground of traditional film and make the background, or what's called "second unit," the foreground, give
that
the principal focus. I was trying to look at buildings, masses of people, transportation, industrialization as
entities
in and of themselves, having an autonomous nature. Same thing with nature: rather than seeing nature as something dead, something inorganic like a stone, I wanted to see it as having its own life form, unanthropomorphized, unrelated to human beings, here for billions of years before human beings arrived on the planet, having its own Entity. That's what I tried to put into the film; what people get out of it is another matter. I was trying to show in nature the presence of a life form, an Entity, a Beingness, and in the synthetic world the presence of a different entity, a consuming and inhuman entity.
MacDonald:
So, you meant to leave the experience open, but reveal, at the end (when we see what happens to the rocket and discover what "koyaanisqatsi" means) what
you
have concluded from what you've shown us?
Reggio:
I started off with the lift off of this rocket, a metaphor for the celebration of modernity, progress, and development, and then I impose my own point of view, clearly, by including footage of the rocket exploding.
MacDonald:
Do you see your position as filmmaker as ironic? Film is, after all, the great technological art form, and yet, you use it to attack the problems of modern technology. Your enterprise in making
Koyaanisqatsi
seems to be part of what you take a position against.
Reggio:
The film is using as high a base of technology as was possible at that time. In fact, that contradiction lost me money, and got me accused of being hypocritical, confused. I don't see it that way. If I could have presented my point of view by just
thinking about it,
then I would have done so and saved myself the effort. Obviously, that's impossible: no Immaculate Conception is taking place. I felt that I had to embrace the contradiction and walk on the edge, use the very tools I was criticizing to make the statement I was makingknowing that people learn in