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walking in the silt. We shot with the 300mm lens at something like seventy frames a second. That gave us a choreographed image.
MacDonald:
Do you know Trinh T. Minh-ha's films?
Reggio:
No.
MacDonald:
Her
Naked SpacesLiving Is Round
was filmed in West Africa, in a number of different cultures. That film confirms your statement about simple living and poverty. Her premise is that to confuse the two is disastrous for the indigenous people and for the visitors.
Reggio:
It is. It's patronizing. Poverty for me
is
the equivalent of violence, and there
is
driving poverty in the South, but that's because the people are being pulled as if by a magnet out of their societies into a cash economy, rather than into a use economy. Tremendous poverty is created by this, which I tried to show in
Powaqqatsi
after the train sequence when we go into the city. There we see essentially the same people, but the looks on their faces have been transformed into a stoic resignation to the hardness of life. Life was not easy in the country, but there was a sense of joy, a sense of dignity. I'm not in any way advocating going back to the teepee or the cave. That's over with. But I do think we need to go to more convivial, decentralized, diversified forms. That's where real progress lies.
MacDonald: Koyaanisqatsi
is a national film; it focuses on the United States as, at least at this point in history, the ultimate market economy.
Powaqqatsi
is international; it moves across national boundaries. But since there's no way to know
where
in the Third World these people are from, the film tends to render them all distant exotics, rather than people we can place within particular cultural contexts.
Reggio:
Well, I did that consciously. The shots in Peru, as an example, had to interact with the shots of Hong Kong, with the shots in Africa, with the shots in India. My intention was not to make a travelogue, but a mosaic that could communicate the simultaneity of life. I was not trying to document how people live in Peru. I was trying to show that the unity of people in the South was achieved through diversity, whereas in
Koyaanisqatsi
the unity was achieved through homogenization: the machinery of commoditization renders everyone essentially the same. Had I had the money, I would have shot
Koyaanisqatsi
in Europe and Japan as well as in the States, because I feel that what was lensed here is equally true for any industrial zone.
MacDonald: Powaqqatsi
focuses on children. You create a sense of simultaneous horror and admiration: horror that kids, particularly the city kids, have to grow up so fast, and astonishment that they
do
.
Reggio:
There are a number of reasons for the focus on children. Half or more of the population of the South is under twenty-five. By the time children are four or five, they're already part of the work force.
Another reason I used so many children is that people's hearts are