in and of themselves, having an autonomous nature. Same thing with nature: rather than seeing nature as something dead, something inorganic like a stone, I wanted to see it as having its own life form, unanthropomorphized, unrelated to human beings, here for billions of years before human beings arrived on the planet, having its own Entity. That's what I tried to put into the film; what people get out of it is another matter. I was trying to show in nature the presence of a life form, an Entity, a Beingness, and in the synthetic world the presence of a different entity, a consuming and inhuman entity.
So, you meant to leave the experience open, but reveal, at the end (when we see what happens to the rocket and discover what 'koyaanisqatsi' means) what
have concluded from what you've shown us?
I started off with the lift off of this rocket, a metaphor for the celebration of modernity, progress, and development, and then I impose my own point of view, clearly, by including footage of the rocket exploding.
Do you see your position as filmmaker as ironic? Film is, after all, the great technological art form, and yet, you use it to attack the problems of modern technology. Your enterprise in making
seems to be part of what you take a position against.
The film is using as high a base of technology as was possible at that time. In fact, that contradiction lost me money, and got me accused of being hypocritical, confused. I don't see it that way. If I could have presented my point of view by just
then I would have done so and saved myself the effort. Obviously, that's impossible: no Immaculate Conception is taking place. I felt that I had to embrace the contradiction and walk on the edge, use the very tools I was criticizing to make the statement I was makingknowing that people learn in
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Monument Valley as seen in Reggio's
(1983).
terms of what they already know. In that sense, I saw myself, if I may be so bold, as a cultural kamikaze, as a Trojan horse, using the coinage of the time in order to raise a question about that very coinage.
My films are based on the premise that the question is the mother of the answer. Giving people answers does them no service; I found out as a pedagogue that the intrinsic principle of learning is the
not the teacher. All the teacher can do is set the environment. I believe in the Socratic method, that basically the best you can do for a personif you're interested in
learningis to raise questions. Through that process of questioning, they can come to an answer. I felt it was important to create an experience of the subject from which conceptualization could start to take place. I'm not interested, during the course of the one hundred or eighty-seven minutes that one sits and watches these films, in creating an intellectual dialogue. I'm hoping that people can let go of themselves, forget about time, and have an experience. Once the experience is had, and held, which is certainly not going to happen for everyonethese films are not for everyone, but they are for some people
the process of reflection can start to take place. I feel these images can keep coming back to people.
Obviously, I can't (and don't want to) control people's reactions. I've been criticized severely for both films. In fact, I was spat upon in Berlin when
was shown there, for aestheticizing poverty.
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I'm pleased that the film had such a strong response. That's not to say that everybody felt that way, but some people did. Some people felt, who am I to deny the opportunity of the Third World to make their lot better through industrialization. The Left especially took after this film in Berlin. But I feel there's a
confusion between poverty and the norms of simple living. It's a distinction that some in the Left have not digested yet. Witness the collapse of repressive ideology in the East and everyone opting for a market economy as the way to bring about some kind of sanity. Yet, the market economy only further removes them from sanity and leads toward bigger problems down the line. This is not a popular position to take, especially right now. East Berlin has this sinister, bureaucratic Stalinist architecture; you can feel the ghost of the Nazis. But the Disneyland of West Berlin is no answer: people are addicted to the materialization of all values through the market economy. We've created a need that we've become addicted to.
My persuasions are also of the Left, but of a Left deeper than the ideological Left or the bureaucratized or the movement Left. Mine is more of an anarchist's Left.
Has
been shown in the Third World?
Yes, first at Tashkent, which is the biggest third-world festival, and later in Sao Paolo. It had a great response. In Sao Paolo it won Best Film, an audience award.
won the same honor five years previous to that. I felt that was the real test of how the Third World responds to the film. I recently showed
