A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

decoration for the mythic adventures of Western swashbucklers, but as individuals functioning in day-to-day life. In order to effect this change in perspective, Reggio uses a different set of techniques. Instead of time lapse, which almost inevitably reduces individual actions to patterns, Reggio exploits slow motion, which not only allows us to see individual motions in precise detail, but reveals the grace and dignity of forms of physical labor rendered trivial or repellent in conventional cinema.

Powaqqatsi

is an immense montage of individuals laboringand to a lesser degree, celebrating, worshiping, relaxingin Peru, Brasil, Kenya, Egypt, Nepal, and India. The focus on third-world labor is contextualized by sequences that represent the allure of the industrialized world, especially as it is marketed on television, an allure that, as

Powaqqatsi

reveals, is already transforming the Southern Hemisphere: one of the film's organizational principles is the juxtaposition of the beauty of life and labor in natural settings and the frenzy of labor in the third-world city.

Reggio has frequently been criticized for his naïveté in participating in the very patterns he pretends to abhor:

Koyaanisqatsi

is an antitechnology film

but

it was produced not only with technological means but with the most technologically advanced cinematic means available;

Powaqqatsi

sings the dignity of the laboring, third-world individual

but

provides no information about the individuals filmed, rendering them socially decontextualized exotics: indeed, Reggio's "adventure" in filming his second feature can be seen as a form of swashbuckling. As is clear in the discussion that follows, Reggio has thought about these charges, but whether the reader is satisfied with Reggio's explanations or not, he must be given credit for what he

has

accomplished. He has made visually arresting nonnarrative feature films that generate considerable thought and discussion in the audiences that see them, and he has brought his vision to a substantial audience, while refusing to reconfirm crucial ideological conventions of much of the commercial cinema.

I spoke with Reggio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in March 1990.

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MacDonald:

I understand that before you became a filmmaker, you were a member of the Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic monk.

Reggio:

Until I was twenty-eight.

MacDonald:

I'm curious about how you went from that life to making a 35mm feature film.

Reggio:

Well, one of the vows you take as a Christian Brother is to

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teach the poor gratuitously. That was the original spirit of the brotherhood, though that spirit is long since gone. There were all sorts of rational and "correct" reasons why the brothers were not able to teach the poor: it wasn't practical; if they

did

teach the poor, they couldn't sustain their life-styles. In fact, almost all the children in the schools where I taught were middle-class kids, and yet I lived in

this

community [Santa Fe] where about forty percent of the people had no access to primary medical care, and where the barrio was being eroded out from under the poor. There was great social disintegration. A lot of the people who were and are in the barrio come from the little villages in Northern New Mexico that were pushed out because of welfare laws. So there was a huge community of poverty, and I felt drawn to give some kind of assistance if I

could

.

When I started to work in the community, it became apparent that there were huge neighborhood-based gang structures, nine in number. I dedicated myself to dealing with that situation, and that got me in trouble with my order because they felt that I was acting in a singular, rather than a communal, way.

During the course of that activity, a friend turned me onto a film. I had not seen many films, to be truthful. I went into the brotherhood at the age of fourteen; we were told to shun the world, or were made to shun the world.

MacDonald:

Was it your choice to join the order?

Reggio:

Yes, it was. I had a desire to pursue an idealistic life. I think children, especially adolescents, pursue as much meaning as they have access to, and this looked like a very meaningful thing for me to do. I lived in a very stratified racist society, New Orleans, and I don't want to say I had lived la dolce vita, but I had lived a pretty fast life already by that time, and I wanted to leave it for something more meaningful. My family wasn't so happy about my choice, but they gave me the freedom to do what I wanted to do. So that meant being away from them from that time forward.

Anyway, during the course of my life in Santa Fe, my friend turned me onto this film by Luis Buñuel,

Los Olvidados