THE MAKING OF NAQOYQATSI
“To the degree that he masters his tools, [man] can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image.” --Ivan Illich
With the third film of The Qatsi Trilogy, director Godfrey Reggio turns his attention to the explosive phenomenon of globalization – a world held in unity through the vice of technological homogenization. While his acclaimed films “Koyaanisqatsi” and “Powaaqatsi” revealed the final battles of nature and native cultures, with NAQOYQATSI, Reggio acknowledges that globalization and lightningpaced technological change are remaking the world in their own image and likeness. In a conscious embrace of contradiction, he has chosen to use cuttingedge filmmaking techniques to pose powerful new questions about the global order: what does our ultra high-tech future look like now that it is inevitably approaching? To respond to this question, Reggio offers his viewers the themes of technological happiness, civilized violence with war as ordinary daily living and sanctioned aggression against the forces of life. From the point of view of NAQOYQATSI he stands with Illich in saying that freedom is the ability to say no to technological necessity.
NAQOYQATSI presents Reggio’s essential vision of the newly wired world: of human beings on the brink of a shift that will bring us closer to the melding of mind and machine, language and numbers, pleasure and simulacra, meaning and marketing, life and war -- and asks questions about what it will mean for the human experience.
Alternately breathtaking and shocking, digitally “re-animated” images from the hum and roar of modern life – from psychedelic fractals to athletes shattering the limits, from roiling tidal waves to frenetic riots, from primal infant smiles to Gforce grins – stream across the screen set to and against the rhythms of Philip Glass’s hauntingly melodic score. The result is a sound-and-image adventure that goes somewhere unexpected: into a direct experience of this high-tech moment in history, with all of its potential for both breaking new barriers and accelerating out of control.
“In NAQOYQATSI, technology is not so much something that we use any longer as something that we live, that we breathe like the very oxygen around us, that is transforming us without our awareness,” says Reggio. “But what price do we pay for the pursuit of this technological happiness? I see NAQOYQATSI as a film about an event that is unnamable. It is my deep feeling that we no longer have the language to describe the world in which we live. So this film without words is an attempt to re-animate that old adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ Only in this case, hundreds upon hundreds of images add up to its meaning.” Adds producer/technologist Joe Beirne who collaborated with Reggio and editor Jon Kane on the film’s extreme look: “I feel that NAQOYQATSI reveals how the material of our globalized culture might look to an alien being, to someone with a completely different set of criteria for evaluating it. Godfrey uses the means of our hyper-image-oriented culture to reflect the strangeness and awesome wonder of that culture back to us.”
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Godfrey Reggio has thought deeply about the nature of image and spectacle in contemporary society. “The image is approaching the point of omnipresence,” he says. “It is reality, it is location, it is idea. And now, with digital technology, image has become pure illusion. There are no limits to the images we can create. But images become iconic to culture in that they become so familiar, and so resonant they’re not even seen. They have enormous control and power over our lives. What we see without question we become. But there is ample reason to question each image in NAQOYQATSI.”
Reggio has also long been concerned about the impact of technology not only upon the environment but also on human happiness, and has researched a wide variety of philosophical and scientific viewpoints on the subject. Among the inspirations for NAQOYQATSI are two seminal books about the future of the technocratic society: Ivan Illich’s Tools of Conviviality, in which Illich critiques modern industrial society and suggests rethinking technology on a human scale; and French sociologist Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, in which Ellul explores how human beings sacrifice their humanity to efficiency, the ultimate law of technology. Both Illich and Ellul express concerns that technology has become our master, rather than the other way around.
But NAQOYQATSI is not about theories. It’s about experience. So Reggio asked the question: “If we are so bound up inside this 24-hour, non-stop, allpervasive technological life, how can we see what it looks like or what its effect is upon us?” To get a better look at things, he began assembling a catalogue of images from everyday reality in our millennial times – images which, removed from their everyday context, become exotic, alien and surprisingly impactful. For his previous films, Reggio traveled throughout the world, capturing original images. But this time, he decided to picture our world in a different way. Instead of going to locations, he made the decision to “use images as locations,” giving stock footage entirely new meanings by manipulating and dissecting them in startling and emotionally provocative ways.
Reggio: “The iconic images of today are images of consumption, of the good life, images that are like wallpaper of the world we live in, images that we see everyday and that blend into the background of life itself. So the idea of this film is to take these iconic images and make them the ‘location’ for this film. We didn’t so much ‘shoot’ this film, as ‘create images’ that are re-contextualized from the way you normally see them.”
Reggio began by creating a most unusual “script,” which was more of an outline of the images he would seek than anything resembling scenic directions and story line. The script provides insight into the themes behind each of the three movements. Briefly stated (in Reggio’s words) they are: MOVEMENT ONE/NUMERICA.COM: Human language, real place gives way to numerical code and virtual reality; metaphor is consumed by metamorphosis; body to disembodiment; natural to supernatural; many to one.
MOVEMENT TWO/CIRCUS MAXIMUS: Competition, winning, records, fame, “fair play” and the love of money are elevated to the prime values of life. Life becomes a game.
MOVEMENT THREE/ROCKETSHIP 20th CENTURY: Electronic acceleration can best be described as ‘exit velocity,’ an event that blurs all perception, shatters all meaning, drains all content, breaks the bonds to earth, producing a world that our language can no longer describe. The resulting explosive tempo of technology is war, is civilized violence. Reggio: “My films have no screenplay per se because there are no spoken words in the film. Instead, I write the equivalent of a dramaturgical shaping of the film that serves as the point of view of the project, which serves as a way to get us off the platform. From there, each person involved in the film brings their own creativity to the event.”
For Reggio, intense creative collaboration is part and parcel of the style of his films, especially NAQOYQATSI. “This project was predicated on a collaborative mode wherein each person was considered an artistic player,” says Reggio. “I brought a feeling, a motivation, a point of view and intention but NAQOYQATSI was way too complex to be realized by just myself. Only collaborative energy could pull it off.”
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The creative process of NAQOYQATSI began over a decade ago when Godfrey Reggio first began discussing the idea of a third and final “Qatsi” film with his friends and colleagues, including composer Philip Glass, who provided the acclaimed scores for “Koyaanisqatsi” and “Powaqqatsi.” For a long time, the project existed only in discussions and in lists of ideas, images and sounds – and these lists and discussions constantly evolved.
Recalls Philip Glass: “For years, I was absorbing the concepts, intuitions and visions that Godfrey had. I wasn’t writing, I was just listening. And over time, our idea of the film changed because Godfrey changed, I changed and the whole texture of the world changed.”
Meanwhile, through all these changes, bringing the film to life at times seemed a far-off dream. Desperate for the funds to make the film a reality, the filmmakers began seeking what they called “an angel.” After the New York Times ran an article about Reggio’s quest to make NAQOYQATSI, Academy Awardwinning director, writer and producer Steven Soderbergh stepped forward. “Soderbergh said he was astonished that we couldn’t find funding for the project. He had one word for us,” remembers producer Larry Taub, “and it was start.” Once production began, Reggio brought the entire NAQOYQATSI team, many of them like himself and his long-time producer Lawrence Taub natives of New Mexico, to a small studio in Lower Manhattan where they could be close to Philip Glass and respond to his creative process while providing him with images and research to inform his score. Here, a close-knit team of researchers, animators and technicians, together with editor/visual designer Jon Kane, spent two intensive years searching out and culling images from stock houses and film archives across the world, evolving a distinct vocabulary of digital manipulation while weaving picture with sound.
It was difficult, seemingly endless, sequestered work. Then, in the midst of the process, the September 11th, 2001 attack struck a few blocks from their studio. “I think the events of 9/11 certainly had an impact on this film,” says Reggio. “When the crew returned to work, I think everyone was in a deep state of shock, but I found that within one week many people, in particular Jon Kane, ended up totally revved, because now more than ever the importance of the film’s subject was crystallized.”
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To bring a bracingly unfamiliar view of the images that surround us to NAQOYQATSI, Reggio brought on board media technologist and co-producer Joe Beirne, who creating the production’s state-of-the-art digital production facility and oversaw the film’s extensive array of computer-generated effects and visual manipulations. More than mere eye candy, these experiments with visual effects led to some of Reggio’s most emotional, otherworldly and uplifting images. Producer Joe Beirne estimates that about 20% of NAQOYQATSI is made up of original photography (including much of the prologue). The rest of the images were culled from scientific laboratory and military films, old newsreels, recent news coverage, commercials, television programs and documentaries – then digitally transformed in myriad ways.
Explains Beirne: “We broke down the scope of potential visual transformation of every image into color, contrast, image layering, grain structure and resolution, pattern and texture, aspect ratio, scale, speed and transition dynamics and used a comprehensive battery of these techniques in the film. Most of the images in NAQOYQATSI are presented in a transformed state, but it is the dynamic interaction of images that is most transformed. The fluid character of this transformation was achieved through manipulating the degree of image-upon-image across the screen and over the duration of the shot or sequence of shots. This was often achieved by masking parts of the image and then evolving those masks to change with the internal structure of the image. Editor/visual designer Jon Kane is fluent in this visual language, and it evolved into the basic visual vocabulary of the film.”
Even the original footage shot for the film utilized transformational techniques, including an extensive use of slow motion and other techniques such as thermal photography.
Beirne describes NAQOYQATSI this way: “This is a film made of everything except pure motion picture film. Even the portion of 35mm film that was shot for NAQOYQATSI was super high-speed, making it very different from the normal elements you knit a movie out of. I’ve never worked on a film before where you had 90 minutes of opticals; where the whole movie is a visual effect from beginning to end, but that was Godfrey’s challenge to us.”
Despite the fact that Reggio massively distrusts technology and feels it is the most misunderstood reality in our world, Beirne found the director had a vast and open-minded curiosity and creativity when it came to experimenting with new techniques. “Sometimes I think you respect your enemies more than your friends, and Godfrey has tremendous respect for technology,” explains Beirne. “Godfrey’s innocence when it came to how these technologies work might actually have been an advantage, because he has far fewer prejudices about what to expect than someone who is obsessed with technology. For him, this film became a genuinely open experiment, and experiment is not a word I think can be seriously used about filmmaking very often.”
It was Beirne who was responsible for finding ways to achieve the look Reggio envisioned for NAQOYATSI. “When Godfrey described this project to me for the first time, he brought with him a stack of cards done in Photoshop that had been distorted and re-colored…altered so as to make them distinct from their original source. He wanted to explore a similar style, of what he called reanimation,” explains Beirne, “by which he meant ‘re-vivify’ rather than ‘animate again.’ It seemed to me that what Godfrey was describing was a kind of false color image of our culture, to give us new tools to evaluate what we see.” One of the biggest technical challenges of making NAQOYQATSI was the sheer volume of information collected – it has been estimated that NAQOYATSI utilized some 3.5 terabytes of information (3500 gigabytes). Explains Joe Beirne: “NAQOYQATSI is unique in that in order to find out what the final product would be we had to preview virtually every possibility in its final form. And then since the film is a mixture of imagery, not only did the individual frame have to be perfected, but the combination of those images had to be taken to a certain level. The practical result of that is that we had an enormous amount of media – and very large files – at play at any given time. What we wound up doing is effectively making 25 different feature films from which we then selected our favorite ten percent. Then we began editing.”
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From the beginnings of the “Qatsi” trilogy, Godfrey Reggio felt that the images in his films should flow almost like music and share equal weight with an equally emotional musical soundtrack. It was for this reason that he originally approached one of America’s best known serious composers: Philip Glass. Glass’ rhythmic, hypnotic lyricism seemed to be the musical equivalent of Reggio’s visual style.
Although Glass has become an indispensable collaborator in the entire “Qatsi” series, he notes that he originally tried to evade Godfrey Reggio when the two first met in the 1970s. “I didn’t consider myself a film composer then,” says Glass, “so I avoided him as long as I could, but he wouldn’t go away.” Glass could not have predicted then that their first film together, “Koyaanisqatsi,” would become one of his most beloved and acclaimed musical works, noted for its vast breadth of instrumental colors, for its broad global influences and for its hauntingly cyclical refrains of chanting, reeds and keyboards. It was the very first film score Glass ever composed, but he went on to compose dozens of acclaimed and award-winning soundtracks afterwards. Now, for NAQOYQATSI, Glass has created a score in an entirely new vein: perhaps his most distinctly melodic and lushly orchestral piece. Glass and Reggio talked at length about the making of NAQOYQATSI for over at least ten years, discussing the sensory and aural equivalents for the image lists Godfrey was simultaneously preparing. But, when at last Reggio began collecting, editing and re-animating the film’s imagery, the music flowed from Glass. “When I finally sat down to write the music, the pieces came very fast, boom, boom, boom, one after the other. It just came out,” he says. Glass knew that this score would be palpably different from his other “Qatsi” scores – because the images were also so startlingly new. “The visual language of this film is radically different from anything else,” says Glass. “Working from digital images changes the essence of everything because these are images that don’t exist in the real world. The world of NAQOYQATSI had to be created, envisioned and revisioned and that is a big change from ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ and ‘Powaqqatsi.’”
Glass hopes that the score will provide a kind of touchstone for the audience as they make their way into the alien world Reggio creates visually. He continues: “Godfrey and I surmised early on that the best musical complement to the images would be something more in the traditional orchestral vein since the images are so disconnected from the familiar world. The orchestra provides some kind of entrance, like a doorway, into the film. I feared that if the piece were too abstract people wouldn’t connect with it. For that reason I went with a very acoustic, symphonic piece that could be played by a real human orchestra.” Glass and Reggio also decided early on to use one instrument, in this case the passionate voice of the cello, to play a single line running through the entire piece. But neither man realized that Glass’s soundtrack would become a de facto 21st century cello concerto for Yo-Yo Ma.
Glass wrote the piece before Yo-Yo Ma became involved, but as serendipity would have it, the piece spoke to Ma almost magically. “When I showed the music to Yo-Yo, he said ‘oh, you wrote it for me,’” recalls Glass. “And, it really appears that it was. It was one of those strange coincidences where the music really seemed to become his music. We didn’t want the cello to become an overpowering presence, but we wanted it to be woven in as a kind of voice and unifying force, and I think that’s what Yo-Yo has done.”
In addition to using traditional classical instruments, Glass added out-ofthis- world touches by melding in such folk instruments as the Australian didgeridoo, noted for its eerie, droning wind sound, and an electronically-created Jew’s Harp. In the end, Glass found his music adding a lightness and an accessibility to some of the film’s darkest images and themes – and for the film’s finale, he composed an exhilarating denouement. Says Glass: “The idea from the beginning, Godfrey said, was to not let things be as dark as they seem. When it came to the ending, my problem, if you can put it that way, was to write something that would step away from the rest of the piece and open up a door we didn’t even know was there.”
Glass’ ecstatic musical climax reflects some of Reggio’s most open-ended and provocative image-making to date. In fact, Reggio says that he himself maintains an unexpected optimism about humanity’s future –so much so that the final act of NAQOYQATSI is indeed labeled in his script: “Startling Hope.” He explains: “To me the hopefulness of NAQOYQATSI is that we had the freedom to make this commentary on what to me, not necessarily to the crew or the audience, is a tragic event: the transition out of our basic human state into what I call the vivid unknown. We find ourselves in an environment of acceleration that is causing complete annihilation of many life forms. Yet, my own life is suffused with hope. I don’t see this as a contradictory. I feel that we should embrace things that are contradictory. I don’t believe in black and white or good and evil. I believe in this and that.”
Ultimately everyone involved with the project agrees that NAQOYQATSI is best experienced rather than described. Sums ups Joe Beirne: “I think as a cinematic experience, NAQOYQATSI is quite unique in that it demands more of the viewer emotionally than retinally. It requires active involvement from the viewer. You aren’t being led in a specific direction; the film leaves you at a fork in the road.”
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