Time & Perspective Quote by Godfrey Reggio

Reggio is naming the quiet coup of modern life: words still exist, but the real governance happens in images. Not just photographs or film frames, but the whole visual operating system of late capitalism - advertising, television, interfaces, spectacle. When he calls the image "the language of the order in which we live", he folds aesthetics into power. Images are how authority persuades without arguing, how desire is manufactured without ever sounding like a command. If you want to "commune with the public", he implies, you don't meet people where they think; you meet them where they are already being addressed.

The subtext is a filmmaker's confession and a critique in the same breath. Reggio isn't celebrating the image as pure truth; he's admitting that to reach a population trained on visual stimuli, you have to speak the medium that also trains them. That's the "conscious embrace of a contradiction": using the tools of mass persuasion to expose mass persuasion. Koyaanisqatsi and its siblings work exactly in that tension - hypnotic, gorgeous, almost advert-like sequences that seduce the viewer into attention, then leave them alone with the unease. No narration, no tidy moral, just the feeling of being overwhelmed by your own era.

It's also a refusal of the old documentary bargain. Instead of telling you what to think, Reggio builds a sensory argument: if the world has become image-driven, then critique has to be image-fluent. The contradiction isn't a flaw; it's the cost of speaking to a public that has already been spoken for.