Seeing One Another Anew with Godfrey Reggio’s Visitors

Abstract

Godfrey Reggio's Visitors (2014) is a film that one has the immediate urge to flag up as being an example of a 'philosophical' film in lieu of a better term, superlative or derogatory. Our approach in this essay is tempered by Ben-Ami Scharfstein's (2009) soft-spoken reminder that an example has an independent existence with a rich, maybe endless, set of characteristics of its own. It has a life apart from the abstraction it illustrates. "The more fully the example is described, the more directions it leads in, until, imagined from its innumerable possible angles, it leads everywhere imaginable" (2009, p. 434). Thus, we opt for a 'thick description' in presenting some of the thoughts and insights that Visitors occasions. Paradoxical as it may sound, if we let Visitors have its life apart from philosophy-that is, apart from the abstraction which it purportedly illustrates-it will usher philosophy in.Visitors is the fourth major collaboration between filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass, following their so-called 'Qatsi Trilogy': Koyaanisqatsi (1984), Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002. Visitors continues to explore some familiar moral themes from the 'Quatsi Trilogy'. In so doing it offers a lamentation for the havoc that humankind's obsession with technological advancement has wreaked on our world and a concomitant urge to be more human and gentler. The film stands out both formally (it is shot almost exclusively in black and white) and in terms of its subject matter: Reggio's focus is on portraits of individuals (including one lowland gorilla), nearly all of them photographed in close-up, probing their subtle nuances, fleeting expressions and various permutations thereof. Extended sequences in the film consist of successions of exceedingly slow-motion photography ('live stills'), which delve into a range of possibilities of reciprocal gazing: as we look at these portraits, they look back at us, as it were. More than merely portraying the individuals who occupy the screen as passing visitors aboard 'Starship Earth,' the film explores the human face as the final frontier, bringing its viewers into uncanny, intimate encounters with these living portraits; as if it is we who are the visitors-onlookers at some sort of cinematic menagerie inhabited by humans.The concept of Visitors germinated gradually over more than a decade. Sediments of defunct interim projects can be identified in the film's final form. Reggio initially developed a film, The Border, that drew on Butoh-style techniques to explore a range of emotive human expressions, which then morphed into the cinematic exploration of the live stills at the heart of Visitors. Images from Savage Eden include a fantastic vision of primates in a pew. These are reimagined in Visitors into a long panning shot in Visitors, in which we track along the faces of five human beings, all deeply engaged in computer games (Reggio calls them 'cyborgs'), arriving at a gorilla, who becomes 'the adult in the room,' the only individual in the film not connected to...