Godfrey Reggio Quotes

History has been the history of warfare.

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.

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.

By any measure, we live in an extraordinary and extreme time. Language can no longer describe the world in which we live. With antique ideas and old formulas, we continue to describe a world that is no longer present. In this loss of language, the word gives way to the image as the 'language' of exchange, in which critical thought disappears to a diabolic regime of conformity - the hyper-real, the omnipresent image. Language, real place gives way to numerical code, the real virtual; metaphor to metamorphosis; body to disembodiment; natural to supernatural; many to one. Mystery disappears, replaced by the illusion of certainty in technological perfection.

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 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.

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.

The only thing I can do is type. I learned that when I was 13.

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.

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.

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.

What I'm trying to do is to at least raise a flag to the blinding light of technology.