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10 Things I Learned: The Qatsi Trilogy
By Kate Elmore
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As a teacher and community organizer in the barrios of Santa Fe before he began making films, The Qatsi Trilogy’s director, Godfrey Reggio, often showed Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados to the young gang members he worked with.
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For the past forty years, Reggio’s work, including the making of The Qatsi Trilogy, has been done under the banner of the Institute for Regional Education, a nonprofit organization he cofounded with Steve Goldin, Ray Hemenez, and Lawrence Taub.
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Before they made Koyaanisqatsi together, Reggio and director of photography Ron Fricke created wordless billboards to be placed alongside New Mexico highways, as a way of drawing attention to issues—like government violations of citizens’ privacy—that the IRE sought to address.
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Fricke cites David Lean’s 70 mm masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia (pictured) as the film he saw when he was young that affected him the most. He would have liked to shoot Koyaanisqatsi in that format, but the production’s budget didn’t permit it. However, he has gone on to shoot his own films Chronos, Baraka, and Samsara in 70 mm.
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The shot of the moon in Koyaanisqatsi is a composite of two shots: one of the moon as it passes behind a building with no lights on and one of a building with lights on.
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While shooting street scenes for Koyaanisqatsi, Reggio and Fricke found themselves in Times Square when the New York City blackout began in July 1977.
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The soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi, the first film in the trilogy, was composer Philip Glass’s first film score.
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Portions of the cloud scenes in Koyaanisqatsi were stock footage shot by Louis Schwartzberg, a renowned artist in the field of time lapse photography.
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Poet Allen Ginsberg, who recorded a music track for a demo version of Koyaanisqatsi, was godfather to Reggio’s daughter.
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Glass’s favorite film is The Jerk.
Kate Elmore is a producer at the Criterion Collection.
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As a teacher and community organizer in the barrios of Santa Fe before he began making films, The Qatsi Trilogy’s director, Godfrey Reggio, often showed Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados to the young gang members he worked with.
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