Filmmaker Godfrey Reggio is no great fan of technology.
In his early films Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out of Balance) and Powaqqatsi (Life in Transition), machines were at the center of what he saw as an increasingly self-destructive, dehumanizing world. With his new movie, Naqoyqatsi, Reggio takes his mission a step further.
Naqoyqatsi offers an apocalyptic vision: Humans have forsaken nature for binary code, robotics and acceleration. The Miramax film, which opens Oct. 18 in New York and Los Angeles, is perhaps the most forceful critique of technological culture since Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times.
Predicting the response of general audiences will be difficult -- Naqoyqatsi is radically different from standard multiplex fare -- but the film was enthusiastically received at screenings at the recent Telluride and Venice film festivals.
Like his earlier films, Reggio's Naqoyqatsi is wordless and non-narrative, relying on streams of images and a musical score by Philip Glass. But while Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi were composed of ethnographic-style footage from around the world, Naqoyqatsi's imagery was born of the computer.
Using both off-the-shelf and prototype software, Reggio's team took everyday, sometimes banal images -- wax museum celebrities, outtakes from fast-food commercials, crash-test dummy footage -- and tweaked each one. Every frame was heavily manipulated -- colorized, sped up or slowed down, given texture or stretched to fit the big screen.
The result is a kind of nutritional eye candy -- a film that is spectacular to see, but with a point to make. Reggio describes Naqoyqatsi as an exploration of "tortured beauty" and hopes viewers begin to feel uneasy about the allure of the carefully constructed, market-researched images that they are asked to consume every day.
For Reggio, the release of Naqoyqatsi marks the end of a 25-year filmmaking journey. He began working on his "Qatsi trilogy" in 1976, finishing Koyaanisqatsi in 1983 and the follow-up Powaqqatsi five years later.
Despite the success of those two films, which remain perhaps the most radical movies to ever reach commercial theaters, Reggio spent 12 years trying to fund Naqoyqatsi. After reading about Reggio's struggles in The New York Times, Steven Soderbergh, the director of Traffic, Erin Brockovich and Full Frontal, offered to serve as executive producer, and helped line up the Miramax deal.
Once the money came through, Reggio and his team spent two years sifting through raw video footage, picking out promising clips. As the size of the project became clear -- the team stored 3.5 terabytes, or 3,500 gigabytes, of information -- Naqoyqatsi became an exercise in expanding the boundaries of digital filmmaking. It is probably the most ambitious independent digital film yet.
Without the latest digital gadgetry, Reggio says it is unlikely he would have finished his film.
"This is how naive I was -- I initially thought that I could accomplish Naqoyqatsi in analog form," Reggio said, adding that the budget dropped from $13 million to $3 million because of the advent of digital tools.
The contradiction at the center of Naqoyqatsi -- the reliance on state-of-the-art technologies in an attack on technological advances -- doesn't bother Reggio. He wants Naqoyqatsi to enter the "vascular system" of modern culture, using what he calls "the evil of manufactured images" as an "inoculation or a vaccine."
The disease Naqoyqatsi seeks to address, Reggio says, is a culture addicted to technology. He identifies one key symptom: the increasing distance between the image and reality. Computer-generated imagery, he says, has created a disconnect between what we see and what we know.
"The image is no longer a reproduction of reality," Reggio says. "The image is a creation. Beauty that comes out of the computer has no integrity except the limits of the imagination. It has nothing to do with reality. It's the beauty of zero and one."
