Filmmaker sees trilogy as a wake-up call to Earth

Filmmaker Godfrey Reggio thinks we are living in a time of war, although the war he refers to is not one conducted with bullets and bombs between nations, but a far more encompassing one: the war between humanity and technology. And technology, he fears, is winning out.

“It’s about the complete transformation of the environment in which we’re in,” he says. “Technology means power, control, homogenization, mass man. To me, it’s very negative, it’s taking us out of our human orbit; it’s wrecking the Earth.”

For Reggio, the embrace of technology has been accompanied by the embrace of homogenization -- or, as he puts it, “the Los Angelization of the planet, where things are becoming more similar than dissimilar. For me, this is a tragedy.... My film is an attempt to raise questions about a subject in which there is very little questioning going on. This is an attempt through art to raise questions about the world in which we live.”

His wake-up call has taken the form of a film trilogy, made over a quarter of a century, in close collaboration with composer Philip Glass. Like its predecessors, the latest and last installment, “Naqoyqatsi,” is hard to describe, let alone pronounce (“nah-KOY-kahtsee”). The film, which opens today, presents an impressionistic cascade of images and music, without actors or dialogue to guide our way. Buildings dissolve into waves, and stream-of-consciousness sequences show news footage of marching soldiers, riots, and faces famous (from Madonna to Fidel Castro to Billy Graham) and anonymous, the globe as an integrated circuit, and a dizzying tunnel of zeroes and ones.

A seeming cacophony, but serious themes are embedded within, Reggio says. Each film’s title offers a clue; they were taken from the Hopi language to avoid familiar associations. “Koyaanisqatsi,” released in 1983, was about “life out of balance”; “Powaqqatsi,” released five years later, translates as “life in transformation”; and “Naqoyqatsi” is about “life as war.”

“Naqoyqatsi” opens with Bruegel’s 16th century painting of the Tower of Babel, depicting a biblical story in which people unified by the same language began to build a tower toward heaven. As a former Christian Brothers monk, Reggio has studied the Bible more closely than most, and his explanations are sprinkled with religious references.

“From the beginning, I felt this story was a prefiguration, a prophecy of the future,” he recalls, speaking by telephone from his home base of Sante Fe, N.M. “I feel it mirrors precisely the moment we’re in right now -- where through the hubris of one language, one idea, one way, one world, we feel like we can do anything, that we’re like unto God. The new god is the computer; it becomes the new nature.”

Born in New Orleans in 1940, Reggio attended Catholic schools. Turned off by the fast social life and striving he saw around him, he was impressed with his Christian Brothers teachers, especially “their idealism, their generosity, their willingness to be there for other people, their seriousness and their playfulness.” At 14, he got the calling and entered the order.

But while Reggio was devoted to the charitable purposes of the order, some of the specifics rankled him. Fourteen years later, he left over a dispute about his work with street gangs. It seems to some extent that Reggio still sees himself as an educator, and his solemn, gravelly delivery has a pedagogical tone.

In 1959, he had moved to Sante Fe to continue his training as a brother, and he has remained there ever since. In 1972, he co-founded the Institute for Regional Education, a nonprofit organization whose first project was to raise awareness of how technology was being used to invade privacy and control behavior. Its next project was “Koyaanisqatsi,” which started out modestly enough as a half-hour project on 16-millimeter film until the institute realized that a full-length, 35-millimeter film might gain wider distribution.

During the early stages of production, Reggio was introduced to the music of Philip Glass -- and immediately knew he would be the ideal composer for his film. Never having done a film score before, Glass was initially reluctant.

Then Reggio came to New York in 1978 with a sample clip overlaid with previously recorded Glass music, and the composer agreed to take on the project. It was Glass who suggested making a trilogy, an idea Reggio adopted.

Over time, “Koyaanisqatsi” has become recognized as an art film classic, and it won a large audience when it was aired on PBS. Glass has been pleasantly surprised by the reception, and now he regularly takes “Koyaanisqatsi” and “Powaqqatsi” on the road, performing the music with a live orchestra.

“Each film bridges a new gap, goes to a new place,” Glass says. “Each film score was also radically different. ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ was really an amplified ensemble piece; ‘Powaqqatsi’ was really world music with musicians from all over the world. The third one, we went to an acoustical orchestra, with Yo-Yo Ma playing the solo. You might say, as the films became more visually radical, I sought a common ground with the spectator by going to a more acoustical and traditional sound.”

Despite the art house success of his first two features, Reggio hit a major stumbling block trying to fund the last of his trilogy. “Any small success those other films had were an anomaly. I looked for angels -- people willing to take on a bad deal for the love of the project -- rather than for serious investors.”

Fortunately, he found his angel in the form of another filmmaker, Steven Soderbergh. Two years ago, Soderbergh read a New York Times article about Reggio’s fund-raising problems and he offered start-up money for the production from his own pocket. Reggio flew to Los Angeles to meet with him.

“There was remarkable clarity and soberness on his part. I felt enormously charged by the meeting,” Reggio said. “It was he that brought in [Miramax co-founder] Harvey Weinstein. To me, it showed he [Weinstein] was a lover of film; obviously, this is not going to be a big box office hit.” (The film is being distributed by Miramax.)

In order to work closely with Glass during the 18-month production, Reggio set up shop in New York. Following a broad outline he had written, he and his team had been collecting a massive selection of illustrations, photographs, commercials, television shows and stock footage, which was augmented with original footage of their own. Most of it was then manipulated through digital technology by producer and techno-whiz Joe Beirne.

Reggio quickly admits he is using technology to combat technology. “I’m not trying to find an excuse for this contradiction,” he says. “I’m only saying that technology is the lingua franca of the technological order, and that if I wish to talk in that world, technology is the medium to do so.”