An interview with Godfrey Reggio
O'Brien, Tom
An interview with the director GSHl odtrey Reggio may be the only film director whose conversation ranges from the Hopi to Thonuis Aquinas, from papal encyclicals (especially those of John XXIII)...
...Now we just live in one...
...Religion tends to act as a mediator between us and God...
...After-word, he worked with Santa Fe street gangs, then founded the Snuthwestern Institute for Regional Education, began loarning Hopi lore, and making films...
...The films arc religious if defined a certain way," he says...
...It prompts a last jeremiad...
...Nevertheless...
...My films are religious if they allow someone to have contact with it...
...political activism forced him out...
...Reggio likes to think of his art as prophetic, and typically mixes Hopi and Christian images to explain himself...
...t.o b. t.o b...
...An interview with the director GSHl odtrey Reggio may be the only film director whose conversation ranges from the Hopi to Thonuis Aquinas, from papal encyclicals (especially those of John XXIII) to anarchist theory...
...As in the Bible, a prophet only reads the times, like a shaman holding a mirror up...
...The real future exists in an eternal present...
...Reggio says he is "forever grateful" for his fourteen years as a Christian Brother, and regrets neither joining nor leaving the order...
...World's Fairs used to function as objects of desire...
...Reggio, dressed in black with a lew grey fringes, reminds one not just of a cleric but Shakespeare's Cassius: slim, ascetic looking, almost six-and-a-half feet, he has a lean and hungry look as he stares out of a Manhattan apartment and scowls at high rises, elevated tramways, and Bloomingdales...
...To a degree, he says, his filmmaking has been shaped by the experience...
...The world has become a world's fair...
...In general, it makes us much too mediated in our relation to the lileforce...
...was a Christian Brother until 1968, when his...
...Some images from his films have been treated in an annoying pseudoreligious way, Reggio says with embarrassment-especially the final sequence in Koyaanisqat-si, showing a disastrous space launch...
...The notion of the future as a distinct thing brings in duality...
...But that image is only a metaphor for the whole weight of progress coming down...
...The day after Challenger exploded...
...Prophecy isn't linear, not a reading of the future," he says...
...Reggio says, "the film was playing in Brazil, where it was very popular...
...Reggio, forty-eight...
...They replayed it on the news for a few weeks, and called me a prophet...
...The 1939 World's Fair, the 1851 World's Fair at the Crystal Palace, the unveiling of the Eiffel Tower-all these were symbols of modernity,"' he says...
Vol. 115 • May 1988 • No. 10
