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Child stares at camera in Iquitos, Peru, from
Powaqqatsi
(1988).
opened by seeing children. I found that, unlike American children who almost automatically perform for the camera, children from the South are not ego-bound in relation to the camera. I found a striking innocence and curiosity. They looked
right into
the camera, and I felt that the screen became the medium through which they could turn that look onto the audience.
MacDonald:
Is it fair to say that the title of
Powaqqatsi
[the translation of
powaqqatsi
''(from the Hopi language,
powaq
sorcerer and
qatsi
life) n. an entity, a way of life that consumes the life force of other beings in order to further its own life"is presented at the end of the film] refers to you as filmmaker? Do you see yourself as sorcerer, and film as the life consuming other lives?
Reggio:
It has something to do with that. I can't produce a film
without
using the camera, so I had to freely accept that as a contradiction.
MacDonald:
There are moments in the film that seem to have nothing to do with the Third World. Perhaps the most obvious (and maybe I just don't understand what I'm looking at) is the shot where you're in some kind of car on a track: the experience is very like, the roller-coaster ride World's Fair films take audiences on.
Reggio:
Well, that was shot in Brazil, in Cubatao, which is probably the single, densest industrial zone in the Third World, and the most pollutedso polluted that some children are born without brains. That was a power plant, and we were in a car on a long cable track. It was