Reflection - Negation

IndieWire interview with Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, Naqoyqatsi director: Godfrey Reggio

iW: Do you see benefits from technological progress?

Reggio: There are obvious benefits -- medical or educational. Buckminster Fuller, one of the prophets of the technological order, used all the metaphors like "spaceship earth" and it was his basic point of view that prevailed that said technology is neutral. It's use or misuse that you make of it. So, of course America makes good use of it, Saddam Hussein makes bad use or the Al-Qaeda makes bad use, and the UK makes good use, well that to me is ridiculous. Technology is not neutral. All tools have intrinsic politics and technology is the tool of now. It's not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It's that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life. We are now cyborged, that's not the future, that is the present. Now, that's a hard sell, believe me. It's not a popular point of view.

iW: Well perhaps because there's a sense of inevitability in your films, and I think people don't want to accept that. Because what you're telling me is that we're already there, it's not a warning.

Reggio: That's what I meant about holding a mirror up to society. I think there's an enormous value to being negative. The world we live in today, negativity is not permitted.

iW: No, it's medicated away.

Reggio: Yeah, we want to have the shiny view on everything. But in fact if you look at film as a metaphor, only through the negative can you have the positive print. What I'm trying to get to is the positive value of negation. I think it's the tragedy of our time that we're not aware of the affect of the manner in which we've adopted tools. Those tools have become who we are.

iW: Do people call you a doomsday prophet?

Reggio: I've been called that or a very negative person: "You better take a pill if you go see Godfrey's films, they're pretty dark." What I'm trying to do is to at least raise a flag to the blinding light of technology. Homer said, "Ah, fire, their brilliance, their flaw. Is this the moment of the sunset or the moment of the dawn?" They weren't shrinking from tragedy or from humor. If it could help you sense the moment you were in, it had a very positive value. It wasn't to depress, it was to purge. Now, this all heavy stuff you realize isn't stuff I demand from my crew. [laughs]

iW: Because the theme of "Naqoyqatsi" is civilized violence or a life of war, I'd like to ask you to comment about the time we're in right now, with eminent war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and your own studio having been located south of Canal.

Reggio: Right on the ninth ring outside the bull's eye. As hard as this is going to be to say, I think the events of 9/11, the events that are happening in Israel right now, in Palestine, the events in the Middle East, in South East Asia, in Africa, which we all neglect, and Latin America, and now coming to our shores are the ongoing, logical conclusions of the way of life based on power.

For me, nation-states are the first technology. They homogenize language, develop mother-tongues, become father-lands. They think only of their own interest. And power becomes the arbitrator of what is good and bad. It's curious to me that the gods of the conquered become the demons of the conquerors. History has been the history of warfare.