Godfrey Reggio

Godfrey Reggio (1940–) is an American director of experimental documentary films. The most well-known of these is Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (1982) and its sequels which depict different aspects of the relationship between humans, nature and technology.

• The normality of the world we live in is completely insane. Okay? Now, what are you going to do? All of you have to make a living, so you have to get a job. I would say you don't have to do that. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to get a job. You don't have to earn that money. You can do something else -- if you wish. If you're willing not to have security. If you're willing to work with other people. If you're willing to take that beautiful Zen statement: leap and your net will appear.
  • MASTERCLASS: Godfrey Reggio, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, October 2014. [1]

• When Koyaanisqatsi came out in 1982 (it was begun in 1975), this film taught me to look at the root of the future. Bob Dylan's song "Blowing in the Wind" comes to mind. Our future is blowing in the wind. You can see it in the tense I've created for my films, "the future present", or the rooted future. What we saw in Koyaanisqatsi almost 300 years ago, is even more coming true now because of the rooted future we live in. If you want to change things, I suggest you say no to the rooted future and create a future for yourself. We have a choice to change what's happening.
  • reddit.com r/IAmA forum post, January 2014. [2]

• I call the films I make experiental. If this doesn't sound too weird, I look at the films I've been involved in as my children. When they're born, then they take on a life of their own. To try and remake your child is not a very good idea.
  What advice would I give to you? Whatever you're interested in, whatever you can do, do it. Boldness has genius, magic and power in it. (That's a paraphrase of a Goethe quote)
  • reddit.com r/IAmA forum post, January 2014. [3]

• The technology we have, is probably the most violent act against the planet that we can conceive of, more than the wars on the battlefield. The price we pay for technological happiness is bringing the planet to our knees. It's not something we use, it's as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.
  • reddit.com r/IAmA forum post, January 2014. [4]

• What is patriotism other than mysticism? The sadness and the danger, of course, is that we have become totally dependent on mass society for life itself. It’s not as if we have much choice. What can we do? These concepts are unutterable. They’re now beyond the pale of language. This is partly why I have used Hopi, a non-literate language, to name my films.
  • 1987 interview [5]

• I have a lot of admiration for the director [Godfrey Reggio] because he knew how to give not just pretty pictures or images but was able, through a play of images, to give a critique of the modem world that is very close to my own. But it's rather amusing to consider how differently different people can interpret this film. My wife, for example interpreted it as the story of the development of the world and its progression -- as a presentation of the creation of the world moving along into, very probably, an apocalypse. But one of my friends had a completely opposite reaction to the film. He thought that in the beginning it presented chaos, then moved after that into showing the progressive development of order. So you can see that the interpretation of images is very difficult.
  • Jacques Ellul, "Interview with Jacques Ellul", Radix 19.4 (1990), p. 4-7, 21-24 (cf. description at [6] and bibliographic detail at p. 141 of [7])