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Steven Soderbergh wants to show you something strange. One of our most eclectic — and prolific — modern filmmakers, the Oscar-winning director of Traffic, Contagion, and Logan Lucky has worked in every genre and at every budget level, whether he’s crafting high-gloss heist pictures (Out of Sight, the Ocean’s trilogy), neorealist experiments (Bubble), or paranoid thrillers of a modern persuasion (Unsane, Kimi). Since first emerging into the rough-and-ready ’90s independent film scene with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh has proven himself an agile, compelling presence inside and outside of the studio system. And, having averaged one film or series a year since reemerging from a short-lived hiatus in 2017, including both conspiracy-thriller miniseries Full Circle and sci-fi comedy web series Command Z in the past six months alone, he shows no signs of slowing down.
When Godfrey Reggio’s monumental experimental documentary Koyannistqatsi (Life Out of Balance in Hopi) first entered the zeitgeist, its radical nature as a postmodern film, with a thoroughly entrancing score by Phillip Glass, became intertwined with the rise of MTV and a new era of visual aesthetic being born within the music sphere. From the noise rock band Cows to electronic musicians Dr. Atmo and Oliver Leib to superstar pop singer Madonna, the film had an indelible effect on music and the music video.
Godfrey Reggio is 83 years old. He smokes a pack of cigarettes a day. He’s not planning on quitting — in fact, he believes his habit kept him alive during the COVID pandemic.
Godfrey Reggio’s previous films, starting with the groundbreaking Koyaanisqatsi (you don’t work for years in an independent video store without learning how to spell that one from memory!) in 1982, have certainly aspired to the sublime, and frequently achieved it. Using time-lapse cinematography, juxtapositions of nature and civilization, and unnerving Philip Glass scores, Reggio cried out cinematically over and over about the perils of technology to an increasingly mechanistic planet.
Godfrey Reggio's ONCE WITHIN A TIME should, if at all, possible be seen on a big screen. The film is nominally the first narrative from Reggio, but truth is this is more cinematic tone poem than straight on narrative. That’s fine since this is a film where you simply want to get lost in the sound and images.
This silent, stylized fantasy art film tells the story of the end of a world and the beginning of a new one through a wildly creative montage of stop-motion animation, found footage, and archival movie clips, piecing together an intriguing visual landscape. With a score from composer Philip Glass, this film from Godfrey Reggio and Jon Kane provides a childlike and yet doom-filled visual story.
Godfrey Reggio––New Mexico’s irascible, irrepressible, eternally eccentric monk-turned-academic-turned-filmmaker whose wordless Philip Glass-scored 1982 masterpiece Koyaanisqatsi transformed American avant-garde cinema––has finally debuted his new 50-minute film, Once Within a Time. As always without conventional plot or dialogue, Once is an eclectic, nearly indescribable feast of visual and aural ideas, at once an expansion on and radical departure from Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy, which combines the aesthetics of early-20th-century cinema with modern digital techniques for a thundering parable about the society of the smartphone and its uncertain future.
Just when you think Godfrey Reggio's 50-minute delightfully strange fable can't get any stranger, Mike Tyson pops up as a Pied Piper-type figure who is followed everywhere by a group of happy kids. The rest of the film is filled with unexpected surprises as well, which is only to be expected from the filmmaker behind such landmark sensory experiences as 1982's Koyaanisqatsi.
Avant-garde director Godfrey Reggio surprises once again, enlisting Philip Glass and a handful of clowns to devise a musical multimedia pantomime in which children are tempted by technology.
Once upon a time, a bunch of happy kids follow the beckoning voice of a goddess onto a stage. After riding a merry-go-round they start to notice strange happenings. An Adam-and-Eve-like young couple in wire masks take a piece of fruit from a sinister looking apple-man, unleashing terrible events. Smart phones generate robots, a chimp in a monkey suit and another in a VR helmet, huge industrial power-towers, a baobab tree exploding into a mushroom cloud.
The strangest movie opening today is also the most eerily beautiful: “Once Within A Time” (in theaters, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) is a cinematic parable, just under an hour long, from our wayward Jeremiah of the movies, Godfrey Reggio. Reggio, you may recall, is the Christian Brotherhood monk who took time out from working with youth gangs and the ACLU to make “Koyaanisqatsi” (1982), a wordless documentary/allegory about the collapse of nature in the face of man’s depredations that became a sizable and influential independent hit.
“Art should be painful. It’s like if you have a boil, you want to lance it to get the pus out. Art should be like an art-opsy. It releases the tension. Art’s not a happy thing.” That's a Variety interview with director Godfrey Reggio, the legendary director behind the Qatsi trilogy (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, Naqoyqatsi) who hasn't released a film in a decade, since Visitors. But boy, is he back, and with the help of Naqoyqatsi editor Jon Kane as editor and co-director. Their creation, Once Within a Time, is a perfect "art-opsy" and a truly unique experience.
In 1982, Godfrey Reggio forever changed cinema — and, really, pop culture in general — with Koyaanisqatsi, a documentary built around mesmerizing, otherworldly images of human activity set to a now-immortal Philip Glass score. The film’s despairing, godlike perspective struck a nerve in the early, yuppified ’80s: The title came from a Hopi word meaning “life out of balance,” and Reggio, himself a former monk, captured our complacency and destructive routines in a series of breathtaking sequences. But while Koyaanisqatsi was certainly disturbing, it was also beautiful — like, “enlarge any frame and hang it on a wall” beautiful — so it had an immediate impact in the world of advertising as well, and pretty soon the film’s style was itself commodified.
Once Within a Time, an experimental creation fable from the iconic documentarian Godfrey Reggio, clocks in at 52 minutes, which is just right for the material, and its release was accompanied by a retrospective series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
A pack of wolves howls at a massive iPhone that’s propped up in the snow like a monolith, an image from George Méliès “A Trip to the Moon” frozen on its screen. A steampunk Trojan horse — or is it an ark? — delivers a fleet of small children into the future, where they’re greeted by a marionette wearing a mask of Greta Thunberg’s face. Mike Tyson, dressed in the most fantastic Afrofuturist chic, pumps up the youngest survivors of a nuclear and/or robot-induced apocalypse in the middle of a boxing ring that’s held together with actual ropes.
Three Great Things is Talkhouse’s series in which artists tell us about three things they absolutely love. To mark the October 13 release in theaters of Godfrey Reggio’s new film, Once Within a Time, “an anarchic comedy told without words, a sensory feast to be felt through art and music,” the legendary director of Koyaanisqatsi shared the things that make up his life. — N.D.
Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi is one of the most acclaimed experimental films of all time, but unlike many breakout debuts, it did not lead to a prolific career — Reggio instead opting to take a much more patient cadence with his work. The filmmaker’s latest movie, Once Within a Time, coming out a decade after his last effort, is more accessible than one might expect, but very audacious nonetheless.
With an enormous beard, knit cap and tinted glasses, Reggio speaks to me from his chaotic study in his Santa Fe, N.M. ("I'm a social hermit," he says.) There are books and papers everywhere, including a poster of, surprisingly, the Ayatollah Khomeini.