Godfrey Reggio

Godfrey Reggio (born March 29, 1940) is an American director of experimental documentary films.

Godfrey Reggio
Reggio in 2022
Born (1940-03-29) March 29, 1940
New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Occupation(s)Film director, screenwriter

Life

Godfrey Reggio is an American creator of a unique experimental cinematic poetry. He was born in New Orleans in 1940 of a Catholic family lineage established in French Louisiana near 1750. From a soulful beginning in the Church at the age of 14, Reggio passed the ensuing twenty-two years in fasting, long periods of meditative silence, of prayer, vows of life-long poverty, and in choosing to be a monk-friar. It was this ascetic traditional Roman Catholic pontifical teaching Order which ultimately assigned him to the province of Santa Fe, New Mexico. During that ensuing period of his life Reggio served as a teacher at a parochial grade school, a secondary school, and on the faculty of the Christian Brothers College in Santa Fe. Witnessing himself in the secular world as a young intellectually zealous monk schooled in the theology of the Medieval Era, he accepted nothing, questioned everything, even eventually to the structure of the Church.

Following a spiritual crux concerning personal liberation and social activism, Reggio ultimately left the Pontifical Congregation, Ex Claustrum, in 1968, and thereafter helped found the Institute for Regional Education in Santa Fe,[1] a non-profit foundation focused on civil rights, environmental concerns, media development, radically innovative arts, community organization, and social research. He became a founder of La Clinica de la Gente [2] a facility providing medical care and service to 12,000 community members in northern New Mexico's barrios,[3][4] as well as founding the Young Citizens for Action, a city-wide project aiding juveniles in the street gangs of Santa Fe. He then began working with the American Civil Liberties Union, co-organizing a novel public interest campaign on the technological invasion of privacy, the negative impacts of consumerism, and the increasing use of scientific knowledge and the potency of media to control and shape popular behavior. Godfrey Reggio participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2006.

Filmmaker

Reggio’s grasp of the subjective power of visual imagery, from the most ancient times, led to his appreciation of the “moving picture” whereby cinematic art had become a consciousness-altering tool. This began his lifelong career in filmmaking. Reggio relates that a singular event brought him to his profession in motion-pictures. As a religious man, he had refrained from attending movies, feeling that although he was in the world, he was not of it. But another brother showed him the film Los Olvidados by Luis Bunuel saying it might change his life. It did so. Understanding it had less to do with entertainment, but with right outreach effort, it revealed an artistic path to him, an experience he had never had before. Missionizing the film to the street gangs he worked among, cinema appeared to be like a church with tremendous impact on those who see it. He claims it was an epiphany to realize the psychological power of a moving image, the motion picture, and thus launched his world-famous career.

Today, Reggio is widely known throughout the world for his wordless filmography, especially the pre- eminent trilogy of Koyaanisqatsi: “Life Out of Balance”; Powaqqatsi: “Life in Transformation”; and Naqoyqatsi: “Life as War”. The film titles are taken from the Hopi language. These three films portray an apocalyptic vision of the collision between urban life and the global environment. They reveal a humanist philosophy about our planet, the encroachment of technology on nature, ancient cultures, and the splendor that disappears as a result. They chronicle the impact of the modernizing world on our physical and psychological environment. His short film feature titled Evidence [5] was a penetrating display of the effect of cinema on the minds of children, and his moving documentary Anima Mundi, funded by the World Wildlife Fund, revealed how much we share the planet with other creatures, a montage of intimate images of over seventy animal species that celebrates the magnificence and variety of the world's fauna. His film Visitors, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, consisting for the most part of extended slow-motion closeups of people's faces, looking directly into the camera.

Reggio’s latest film, Once Within A Time,[6] was produced by Steven Soderbergh & Alexander Rodnyansky and had its world premiere at Santa Fe International Film Festival (SFiFF) in October 2022. Remarkably unlike so many others in the film industry, Reggio has never personally made any money, or received any royalties or payments from his cinematography.

All of the musical and orchestral soundtracks augmenting and embracing Reggio’s wordless films were created in mutual trust with his lifelong friend and collaborator, the great and eminent composer Philip Glass.

In 2014, Reggio was recognized by the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City with a full career retrospective titled Life with Technology: The Cinema of Godfrey Reggio.[7]

Reggio received the Santa Fe International Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award on Oct. 22, 2022.[8]

Reggio's view of streaming technology

Reggio’s view of cinematic streaming, beyond the idea of theatre, is not that it shapes our point of view, not how it affects politics, not how it affects religion, or the economy, it is that now so much of everything we learn is situated within its technology. Streaming technology is now part of social media and is thus the new host of a reified visual life. In that sense, Reggio insists, imaging technology is not something we use, it is something we breathe, it is in fact our new mental habitat. We keep pretending as if we can use such technology for good or ill. That is somewhat fanciful since technology has its own autonomy, out of our control, its own politics, its own determination, and its own destiny. Within the space of social media streaming is becoming the actual environment of our life, replacing old nature as the host of human habitation and what remains of old nature is paying an enormous price for that. Reggio maintains that an unprecedented problem today is that we are trying to create one fused world, of one path, around a single idea or image: “the blue planet”, a popular idea which he considers somewhat deceptive in its unifying amalgamation. That image is becoming a new quintessential icon, and possibly hazardous because its need of top-down control is widely embraced, and looks so positive. Reggio insists our threatened world is actually our vast and diverse networked range of multiple relationships. The difficult to express beauty of life is that it has been held together through the great web of its diversity. Each to create their own life and to live their own world, their own range of relationships. Today, he argues, the entire planet is threatened because of the inhumane mechanical streaming madness of molten globalization, where there are no apparent limits to the unexamined consolidating dangers we are capable of.

To support living in a technological version of euphoria our life has become predicated in speed, faster and faster and faster and faster. We’ve thus outrun our future. To Reggio, the end, the Eschaton, has already occurred, and we are now living in the aftershock, and he says he is dubious about the veracity of hope. Hope is the substance of what we hope for, and hope is the only term in theology that uses the same term to define itself. It is the substance of what one hopes for that makes hope. So, he declares he is hopeful, but hopeless.

Heritage

Reggio’s well-known ascetic and austere personal life-style had been supported over nearly 50 years by two public charities which have in 2022 recently terminated their existence. Reggio himself retains little or no financial benefit from his filmography. As is well known to all of his friends and admirers he lives with a self-denying indifference to money and commerce and has no realizable equity or future interest in his filmography. The bulk of Reggio's cinematic records, manuscripts, papers, photographs, film rolls, over forty years, have been acquired by Harvard University's Houghton Library, the university's primary repository for rare books, manuscripts and the important Harvard Film Archive[9] is one of the world's largest and most significant university-based motion picture collections housing over 36,000 motion picture titles from around the world and from almost every period in film history. The archive's permanent collection remains engaged in documenting the work of important individual filmmakers, including Godfrey Reggio who is prominently named and is so honored.

Influences

Reggio's approach to filmmaking is influenced by what came before him. In an interview with Revus et Corriges, he stated that he was particularly influenced by the work of experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, who is regarded as one of the most important experimental filmmakers of the twentieth century, and Maya Deren, an American avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist of the 1940s and 1950s. Like these filmmakers, Reggio uses film as a medium for exploring the boundaries of perception and consciousness, using the camera as a tool for capturing the unseen and the intangible.[10]

Filmography
Year Name Director Writer Producer Notes
1982 Koyaanisqatsi Yes Yes Yes a.k.a. Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance
1988 Powaqqatsi Yes Yes Yes a.k.a. Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation
1989 Patricia's Park Yes Songlines video segment; short
1992 Anima Mundi Yes Yes a.k.a. The Soul of the World; short
Fated to Be Queer Yes Short
1995 Evidence Yes Short
2002 Naqoyqatsi Yes Yes Yes a.k.a. Naqoyqatsi: Life as War
2013 Visitors Yes Yes Yes
2018 Awaken Executive
2022 Once Within A Time

References
  1. "Institute for Regional Education, Santa Fe, NM".
  2. "La Clinica de la Gente".
  3. "Koyaanisqatsi".
  4. "The Bob Fitch Photography Archive. "Santa Fe, New Mexico Murals"".
  5. "Evidence". IMDb.
  6. "Once Within a Time".
  7. "Life with Technology: The Cinema of Godfrey Reggio".
  8. "SFiFF's Lifetime Achievement Award".
  9. "Harvard Film Archive/Godfrey-Reggio".
  10. Hyaumet, Alexis (2017-12-31). "Interview with Godfrey Reggio". Revus & Corrigés (in French). Retrieved 2023-04-30.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.