I think it's naive to pray for world peace if we're not going to change the form in which we live.
— Godfrey Reggio
So, not for lack of love of language, but because I feel our language is in an enormous state of humiliation, I decided to make films without words.
In the order I was in, each brother takes five vows, one of which is teaching the poor gratuitously. As a young person I was seized by this idea of social justice and I wanted very much to follow my vow of teaching the poor gratuitously.
I think it's the tragedy of our time that we're not aware of the affect of the manner in which we've adopted tools. Those tools have become who we are.
It's not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It's that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life.
These films however, have ambiguity built into them, because it's too easy in film to make a strident work of propaganda or advertising, which are really the same thing anyway, meaning the message is unmistakable.
Now having said that, I realize that releasing a film in the real world is like trying to get General Motors to release a handmade car.
Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, so we are no longer conscious of its presence.
So to hope to be able to have peace, to be able to have justice and environmental balance, are consequences of our behavior, not just our intentions.
It is very easy to make clear what you want a film to say, but I did not wish to engage in overt propaganda, even for the right cause. I wanted to create an experience through the films, something where people could have the freedom of their own response to them.
History has been the history of warfare.
But in fact if you look at film as a metaphor, only through the negative can you have the positive print. What I'm trying to get to is the positive value of negation.
All tools have intrinsic politics and technology is the tool of now.
In effect, I feel like a blind, deaf, and illiterate person working through the sensibilities and multiple, real talents of other people. Everything I do is collaborative.
The language of the moment or, as it were, the language of the order in which we live, is the image. I felt that if I wanted to commune with the public, I should best do so through the language of image. It's a conscious embrace of a contradiction.
It's not that we use technology, we live technology.
Mystery is gone to the certainty of technological principles. So the real terror, the real aggression against life comes in the form of the pursuit of our technological happiness.
Having been an educator for so many years I know that all a good teacher can do is set a context, raise questions or enter into a kind of a dialogic relationship with their students.
What I'm trying to do is to at least raise a flag to the blinding light of technology.
I think there's an enormous value to being negative. The world we live in today, negativity is not permitted.
Technology is not neutral.
The only thing I can do is type. I learned that when I was 13.
In terms of the feeling of the piece, I cant think about what people are gonna think about it, what are the critics gonna say, I'm trying to bring some resolution, and realize that myself. It's a struggle; it's a process that gets us this.
