Here’s the thing; if you want to interview Godfrey Reggio, you might consider bringing your seven-year-old daughter. I sensed that he was relieved not to be questioned about the meaning of life, but to just hang out with a curious child.
In his bathroom hangs the original sign for Claude’s Bar. As he put it to me, his years at Claude’s were “a formative time in Brother Godfrey’s timeline.” He is a living history of Canyon Road, a window that pulls the past into the present, part of those who believe that art isn’t separate from life but is its purest expression.
Santa Fe has a wizard – his name is Godfrey Reggio.
ON CANYON ROAD
You lived on Canyon Road for a long time. Next to Claude’s, right?
Hippies. I used to go in there in my Christian Brother robes.
It was a place of conversation; you could get into a zillion conversations. It was also a place of fighting. There were a lot of fights at Claude’s, but a lot of dancing as well. It was all mixed together. It was Hispanics, homosexuals, cowboys, hippies, local guys. It was everybody at Claude’s.
Was it odd to have such a confluence of different people?
Well, I’m from New Orleans, so I’m used to that. It was a breath of fresh air for me. I used to go to Tipitina’s in New Orleans. New Orleans is very much like this place.
I lived on Canyon Road because I got permission as a Christian Brother to live outside of the community, because I was working with street gangs.
Was that a good time in your life?
I remember it dearly. It’s like I’ve lived many lives, died many deaths since then. But, yeah, I remember that all; it remembers me, it tattooed me.
ON GEORGIA O’KEEFFE
Georgia O’Keeffe was the first person to give me money for Koyaanisqatsi.
What was she like?
I liked her. She was very sweet and not pretentious.
She sat up in the second seat at The Lensic with binoculars. She said, How can I help you? So she gave me $25,000.
How did you meet Georgia?
Through Juan Hamilton. Juan was a good friend of mine. Georgia treated him like a son, a surrogate, and she gave him those paintings.
ON THE ENVIRONMENT
So much of what you create has to do with environmental collapse. What do you think about the news right now?
I think the collapse happened a long time ago.
We live in a state of shock and call it ordinary daily living, but we’re all in the state of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
The more we consume, the more the environment goes down. The price we pay for the pursuit of our technological happiness is the plummeting of the world we live in. And it’s happening… It’s happening.
What we know is so little compared to what we don’t know. That’s what Koyaanisqatsi was about. It already happened.
In your film Once Within a Time, the horrors that are called up are about what could happen to our children.
When I made Once Within a Time, I didn’t want to have kids that had socialized answers to everything. You find that a lot in New York through education or mommies pushing their kids for adverts. So I got kids from all over the world that had no professional training. I made a film with children, for children of all ages. I consider myself a child. Baudelaire says, Childhood is genius recovered. Well, I never grew up, so it’s there. Soderbergh and all the people I work with, are childlike. That’s the most important thing.
How do you keep that?
It keeps me.
I’m lucky to have it. It’s a gift. It’s called divine madness. Plato says, More powerful than the intellect is the madness that God may give you, if you’re lucky.
ON COMEDY
Comedy is the hardest thing to do, because you deal with tragedy. The existential twins, tragedy and comedy. Aristotle wrote books on both, but the one on humor disappeared into the Vatican Library. Humor questions authority. And comedy is who we are.
ON THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION
So much of what you’ve done frames the idea of liberal democracy coming to end. What do you make of it all now?
It’s happened already.
All the films I make are about exactly the same subject, technology, which is the most misunderstood subject on the planet for me.
We think technology is neutral, it’s the use or misuse we make of it. I don’t buy that. All technology has politics implicated in it.
I’m not standing up for Trump but it might be much different than what it appears to be. He is a very powerful, articulate businessman. The Art of the Deal is who he is.
What he’s doing is negative, but out of the negative can come something very positive.
How’s that?
I’m a filmmaker. Before digital, I had to have a negative to have a positive. So I know the value of negativity. I don’t want to predict what’s going to happen. I just don’t know.
ON THE CHRISTIAN BROTHERS
So how did you wind up in the Brothers?
At 14, I wanted to become a Christian Brother. Most kids want to become like the people they admired. In the seventh and eighth grades, I had Brothers teach me. So I said, I want to be like them. And my mother said, you’re too worldly. Forget it. My father said, we don’t have no money. I’ll get him to be a Brother. I’ll send him off. It’s like going from Dolce Vita New Orleans to the Middle Ages. Everything was done by bells.
ON SCREENS
The average attention span now of child and adult that uses social media is anywhere from 2.5 to 2.8 seconds. So my film, Once Within a Time was edited at 9 seconds per frame to give acknowledgment to that. There are 612 images in 51 minutes.
I used to keep our TV at home locked up and then we blew it up.
Do you remember Jim Erender? He lived on Canyon Road. We blew up 500 TVs in a 16-phase explosion. With dynamite.
We had people donate TVs from all over the place and then Saturday Night Live was just starting and they had a thing called “home movies”. The first film that I was involved with, was the blowing up of the TVs. They called it “Blowjob”. It was in the 70’s.
ON AI
I think it’s a beautiful time to be alive, if I can be so bold.
Why?
Why? Because we get to experience things that no one has ever experienced before. We’re witnessing things that were unwitnessable because of the technology we have. The technology is driving the game.
Do you think the technology, the AI could end up being our monster?
Yes, indeed. AI is the most dreadful thing we’ve ever created.
And it’s manifesting now. You don’t know what’s real, both in script and in person. You can have a person appear that looks as normal as you and I, and they’ll be completely unreal. So it’s everywhere. It’s in the movies. You can’t go to a movie without AI now being in it in all directions. And of course, those that want it badly say, well, we can control it, we’ll put guidelines on it. But it’s becoming more intelligent and more intelligent and more intelligent. It’s more intelligent than we are. It’ll be more intelligent than we are if we don’t use our capacity.
Like nuclear energy?
Well, like Los Alamos is the most protected place on seven planets. More than the White House, the Pentagon. That’s because that’s where all the secrets are. They came here because it was remote, but yes, we have uranium as cake soil, and it’s on the surface. Uranium will influence your consciousness. It changes your consciousness. I’m not talking about it as a bomb, just in the ubiquity of it here. It’s everywhere.
What do you think about Chaco Canyon?
I’m in awe. I don’t think about it. These are other civilizations that I went to. I went to the Hopis because if you were in school and you studied ethnology, you would take the subjective categories of white people and apply them to Native people. So I flipped it around. I took the subjective category of Native people and let them define us. See what I’m saying?
A way of life that calls for another way of living. No university will tell you that.
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PHOTO SFM
Godfrey Reggio’s Once Within a Time will screen at the 12th SITE SANTA FE International, curated by Cecilia Alemani.
The mission of the Godfrey Reggio Foundation is to further Godfrey’s legacy by capturing in perpetuity his ‘creative process’ to an open-source AI access archived database. This will make Godfrey’s life work and philosophy interactive and generative. The digitizing of all archives, ongoing supervision of the website and creation of a small language model and AI integration are costly and time intensive processes, with the need for immediate funding.
