Thirty-five years ago this month, attendees of Santa Fe's fledgling film festival packed the historic Lensic Theater to see screen legend Lillian Gish introduce her performance in D.W. Griffith's "Broken Blossoms," accompanied by the Orchestra of Santa Fe.
As powerful as that union of music and motion pictures was, what followed Ms. Gish that night was an order of magnitude more meaningful to the art of cinema.
It was a motion picture with no narration or dialog to define the viewer’s experience, only the experience itself, a ceaseless montage of beautiful, horrible, endlessly absorbing images set to a hypnotic, urgent score. An audiovisual manifesto driven straight to the brain that changed history, leading humankind to reconsider its priorities and make the world economy more humane and sustainable.
Well, not so much, that last. But humanity did learn how to make killer music videos and car commercials.
The film was Koyaanisqatsi, a co-creation of director Godfrey Reggio, cinematographer Ron Fricke and composer Philip Glass., and it affected film-making forever. Which wasn’t the goal.
Godfrey Reggio left home at 14 to join the Catholic Christian Brotherhood, leading to a lifetime of passionate, progressive activism, co-founding clinics and programs for at-risk youth in the barrios of northern New Mexico. In 1972, he co-founded the Institute for Regional Education (IRE) in Santa Fe, focusing on social research and media.
In 1972, IRE partnered with the ACLU of New Mexico to design a media campaign, including billboards, print and television, on the dangers of surveillance and personal data vulnerability. The nearly-wordless, visually startling TV ads, the first collaborations between Reggio and Ron Fricke, were a sensation, leading people to ask TV stations when the next would appear and sparking a debate on what we would now call digital privacy a decade before Edward Snowden was born.
When the ACLU's sponsorship finished and no one else willing to fund a larger campaign, Fricke convinced Reggio to use the remaining budget to make a film, using the same stark, wordless techniques from the campaign. Thus began Koyaanisqatsi.
Reggio recruited Philip Glass to score the piece, despite the composer's objection that he didn't write film music. "Of course,” said Reggio, “I had never made a film." As each sequence was done, beginning with Fricke and Reggio's documenting the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis, Reggio would show the stock to Glass, who would acknowledge the brilliance of the visuals, work up a theme and hint about payment. The creators wondered if the film would ever be finished, or if anyone would watch it if it were.
Glass: But I wasn’t sure it would ever really happen—it was very idealistic and very beautiful, but it was hard to imagine anyone paying for it. A good friend of ours, Tom Luddy, interested Francis Ford Coppola. We had a screening for him. And I fully expected after x number of minutes to hear very heavy footsteps heading toward the door. I never heard that. And—do you remember this?—he shook both our hands and said, “Congratulations,” and he left. And Godfrey and I looked at each other, and said, What does that mean?
At the time, Coppola was in bankruptcy and couldn't release the film, but his name drew sufficient backing to finish it for the 1982 film festival season, beginning that night in Santa Fe.
The month after the film festival, Brian Eno famously quipped to the Los Angeles Times of the Velvet Underground’s first record, “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.” The same could be said of Koyaanisqatsi.
Reggio and Fricke’s techniques are evident in everything from action movies to video games to the television commercials. While some of their subjects seem anachronistic, their ways of seeing those subjects have helped define our way of seeing everything as the digital age has exploded.
I won’t attempt to describe the film. The wikipedia entry has a decent shot synopsis, if you’re interested.
If you've seen it, there’s no need. Likely enough, every second, from the 23 dashes that stream across the screen to open Paul Pascarella's arresting title sequence to the last Hopi prophecy, are etched into your grey matter, ready for recall.
If you haven't, don't bother with the wikipedia or interviews or even this diary. Just watch it. Start to finish. Preferably on a large screen in a dark room with others, as it was meant to be experienced.
As you are drawn through the experience, you'll find yourself thinking of other times and events. "Is that Challenger?" "That's very 9/11."
But this film, begun over 40 years ago, wasn't history, it was documentary. And prophecy.
And, of course, classic tragedy. Though it revolutionized movies and television and music and a whole lot else, it failed to spark the revolution its creators hoped: a revolution in ourselves and our way of living.
That one still awaits our attention.
Notes:
The wikipedia page for Koyaanisqatsi contains a great load of fascinating details on how the film was made. Wikipedia lists April 28, 1982 as the date of the film’s premiere in Santa Fe. Contemporary stories from the Santa Fe American, Albuquerque Journal and Daily Lobo all list the date as April 26.
Godfrey Reggio’s wiki page does a good job of introducing this remarkable man. See also John Patterson’s 2014 Guardian profile, “Godfrey Reggio: 'My Che Guevara was Pope John XXIII'”.
The Philip Glass quote was from Alicia Zuckerman’s 2005 interview with Glass and Reggio in New York magazine. Other observations from the making of the film from a lecture by Philip Glass April 5, 1986 at Loyola University, New Orleans. His memoir, “Words Without Music,” will be of interest to any follower of his career. His official site is philipglass.com.
Reggio and Glass collaborated on the “sequels” to Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi, using many of the same techniques. Fricke went on to produce similar films Chronos, Baraka and Samsara.