I have to admit, though I'd seen and been duly impressed
with Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi by Godfrey Reggio, I'd
never seen the third piece of the trilogy,
Naqoyqatsi...which I'll be doing soonest and, after that,
will be finding this piece, Once Within a Time, created by
Godfrey and Jon Kane that I just discovered...
Will post a review below this...
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Godfrey Reggio and Jon Kane’s Once Within a Time pulses
with contradiction. Both technical feat and techno-
pessimist fable, this strange brew brims with apocalyptic
unease and naïve exuberance in equal measure, marking a
departure from the strict documentary mode of Reggio’s
Qatsi Trilogy without sacrificing his unmistakable style.
Another wordless film for Reggio (though it contains many
indecipherable words), and with a runtime of only 52
minutes, Once Within a Time is more of a gesture than a
chain of events, though it arguably lands a little closer
to the narrative pole than his previous work. As its
starting point, it takes the biblical story of Genesis,
with a visual pun connecting the “apple” to digital
technology—maybe not knowledge per se, but the incessant
barrage of visual information that, for Reggio,
obliterates our innocence even as it infantilizes us.
Fenced in by screens, a group of children watch a
bewildering array of images. A random sampling includes:
an apple-clutching demagogue (Brian Belott) yammering
operatically; personified emojis and crash-test dummies
executing a danse macabre; giant robots battling flying
saucers in an hourglass sandscape of half-buried Exxon
tankers and askew powerlines; and an Afrofuturist jazz
deity (Mike Tyson) inspiring the children with saxophonic
speech.
The realism of celluloid, insofar as it captures and
preserves whatever was placed before the camera, is only
one of many elements in the film. Reggio and Kane (who
edited Naqoyqatsi) push the dialectical montage of the
Qatsi Trilogy even farther by collaging not just images,
but cinematic genres and visual media. The space of Once
Within a Time contains so many screens within screens and
frames within frames that it allows for abstract stop-
motion animation, an opera sung in nonsense language,
archival footage of ostriches racing across the savannah,
and a nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey—in the form of man in
a white chimp suit (Apollo Garcia Orellana) pulverizing a
cellphone—to bleed into one other or play out
simultaneously.
The score, meanwhile, though recognizably a Philip Glass
composition with all its minimalist interlockings and
repetitions, shows just as much the influence of Iranian
composer and singer Sussan Deyhim, who contributes
additional music and plays the part of a singing
anthropomorphic tree. Interspersed with snippets of the
non-Western, multicultural instrumentation for which
she’s known, the score amplifies the eclecticism of the
images.
In keeping with the Genesis framework, Reggio and Kane
pack the film with visual throwbacks to the origins of
cinema. Irises in and out and intertitles conjure the
“innocence” of a time before the rules of the medium had
yet to be codified. A reference to the iconic shot of the
man in the moon with a projectile in its eye from Georges
Méliès’s Trip to the Moon would seem to express Once
Within a Time’s allegiance to the magical, theatrical
dimension of cinema, as opposed to the Lumière brothers’
documentation of daily life. A return to childlike
imagination and pure play, the film suggests, may be the
only means of averting—or making bearable—the doom we’ve
brought down on ourselves. At the same time, there’s an
awareness throughout of the role of the moving image in
disinforming or merely distracting us from our
culpability.
As an intertitle asks in multiple languages at the close
of Once Within a Time, “What age is this: the sunset or
the dawn?” In other words, whether we see the film as a
bad trip or a good one rests entirely on the individual
viewer. Once Within a Time proposes that, in the search
for viable alternatives to techno-fascism and climate
apocalypse, we might look to the margins of our world, to
unfulfilled experiments (including those of cinema) and
cultures supposedly left behind by history. It’s still
not too late to set ourselves on some other trajectory.
Score: Cast: Mike Tyson, John Flax, Apollo Garcia
Orellana, Sussan Deyhim, Tara Khozein, Miriam Kramer,
Brian Belott Director: Godfrey Reggio, Jon Kane
Screenwriter: Godfrey Reggio Distributor: Oscilloscope
Running Time: 52 min Rating: NR Year: 2023
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