April 12, 2004

Award-winning Filmmaker To Speak On Technology
And The Environment May 5 In The Price Center
Ballroom At The University Of California, San Diego

By Jan Jennings

Godfrey Reggio, inventor of a film style that involves poetic images of emotional impact, will speak on The New Terra Firma: The Technological Environment at 7 p.m. May 5 in the Price Center Ballroom at the University of California, San Diego. The event is free and open to the public. Seating is limited.

Reggio is the featured speaker at the 2004 UCSD Convocation sponsored by the Council of Provosts.

The award-winning filmmaker, based in Santa Fe, creates films characterized by a fluid interplay between original music, vivid imagery, and unusual visual editing. He is best known for his collaboration with composer Philip Glass to produce the Qatsi series of three feature-length films which chronicle the destructive impact of the modern world on the environment.

The first in the series is Koyaanisqatsi, a Hopi word for “life out of balance,” which involves film techniques revealing unexpected patterns of force and movement in both natural and industrialized landscapes.

“Art is free,” says Reggio, commenting on Koyaanisqatsi. “It stimulates the viewer to insert their own meaning, their own value. So while I might have this or that intention in creating this film, I realize fully that any meaning or value Koyaanisqatsi might have comes exclusively from the beholder. The film’s role is to provoke, to raise questions that only the audience can answer.

“This is the highest value of any work of art, not predetermined meaning, but meaning gleaned from the experience of the encounter.”

Powaqqatsi, “sorcerer life,” the second film in the Qatsi series, employs color and visual textures to convey the beauty and dignity of a way of living and working in the Southern Hemisphere that is being undermined by the spread of industrialized values around the globe.

The third film, Naqoyqatsi, “life as war,” employs a juxtaposition and manipulation of images drawn from contemporary media to demonstrate the extent to which natural human rhythms, natural relationships and ancient cultural networks are vanishing as the world is transformed into a site for a synthetic, technological way of life.

The once firm earth, or solid ground, terra firma becomes the new terra firma, as Reggio sees it, of a technological environment.

In addition to creating films, Reggio works on media development, the arts, community organization and research at the nonprofit Institute for Regional Education in Santa Fe which he founded in 1972. He has won numerous awards for his films, including, for Koyaanisqatsi, the Best Film, Sao Paulo Film Festival, the Critics Award, Lisbon Film Festival, and the Grand Prize and Critics Prize, Madrid Film Festival.

The Reggio lecture is co-sponsored by UCSD’s Sixth College, the Departments of Communication and Visual Arts, the Ecology Program in the Division of Biology, the Film and Video Library, and the Committee for World Democracy.

For further information on the filmmaker, visit the Reggio web site at www.qatsi.org. For further information on the May 5 lecture, visit the UCSD web site at http://convocation.ucsd.edu or call (858) 822-2780.

Media Contact: Jan Jennings (858) 822-1684