A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Yes, first at Tashkent, which is the biggest third-world festival, and later in Sao Paolo. It had a great response. In Sao Paolo it won Best Film, an audience award.

Koyaanisqatsi

won the same honor five years previous to that. I felt that was the real test of how the Third World responds to the film. I recently showed

Powaqqatsi

in India and had a great response. About thirty percent of the image is from India, and people from India felt that they were able to re-see the world they live in through someone else's eyes. I felt gratified by that.

MacDonald:

There's an irony in the Left having a problem with the film. The opening sequence, and much of the film actually, is full of respect for the act of labor. The opening suggests two metaphors at the same time: on one hand, it's a Sisyphus metaphor . . .

Reggio:

Absolutely!

MacDonald:

And that opening sequence concludes with a crucifixion metaphor. It's as though you're saying that while it may indeed be horrifying to spend your life going up and down the side of this mine, on another level, this incredible effort and sacrifice should be respected. What comes through most obviously in

Powaqqatsi

is the grace of the labor. I think the image that moves me mostalthough a lot of them are powerfulis right after the credits, where we see two people carrying gigantic bundles. Their labor creates a magical dance.

Reggio:

Yes. It's a woman and a little boy, coming onto the Ganges at Varanasi at sunrise. The Ganges was low at this point so they were

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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

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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