The new film by Godfrey Reggio, with an original soundtrack by Philip Glass, opens next week in Santa Fe (New Mexico).
Forty years after their first work together, Philip Glass has once again collaborated with American filmmaker Godfrey Reggio on a new soundtrack. Their relationship, which began in 1982 with the creation of the original score for the film Koyaanisqatsi – one of the greatest successes of Glass’ career – and continued in Powaqqatsi (1988), the short film Anima Mundi (1992), Naqoyqatsi (2002) and Visitors (2013), will complete another chapter on 22 October with the premiere at the 14th Santa Fe International Film Festival (SFiFF) of a 51-minute half-film entitled Once Within a Time.
Reggio (New Orleans, 1940), who will receive the SFiFF’s lifetime achievement award that day – a ceremony that will be followed by the world premiere of Once Within a Time – describes his latest film as “a bardic event where children resist their destiny. It is, in a sense, a rebus… [because] the language, the signs, the symbols of our day, no longer describe the world that we inhabit. It is an effort to be at once linear and non-linear at exactly the same time, clear and ambiguous exactly at the same time, in the language that every creature on the planet, human animals, and other animals all understand. Through the audacity of the visualization, it reinvigorates the language, taking well-known myths from all ages and turning them on their heads. It is a clarion call to resistance and a call to hope. Hope is not something that is in the mind, it is something real— it is to act. In the end, it asks the evocative question: which age is this, the sunset or the dawn? This age is indeed a liminal zone. A threshold to our vivid unknown.”