"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"
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Godfrey Reggio treats cinema not as a delivery system for messages but as a space for experience. He argues that film, with its seductive mix of image, montage, music, and scale, can too easily deliver a single, unmistakable directive. That is why he links propaganda and advertising: both compress the world into a clear call to think, feel, or buy in a prescribed way. Clarity of this kind can be a trap, turning art into instruction and spectators into targets.
His own work resists that trap by building ambiguity into form. The Qatsi trilogy, made with Philip Glass, offers no narration, dialogue, or conventional plot. It assembles juxtapositions of natural and industrial landscapes, slow motion and timelapse, human faces and machine rhythms, to provoke rather than conclude. Even when the Hopi word koyaanisqatsi suggests life out of balance, the films refuse to identify a single cause or cure. The absence of commentary is not a lack but an ethic: to remove the editorial finger that points and wags.
Ambiguity in this sense is not obscurity; it is an invitation to active reading. By withholding the apparatus of persuasion, Reggio opens room for the viewer’s own associations, doubts, and insights. In a medium that can overwhelm, he chooses to underdetermine, letting the meanings arise in the space between images and in the mind of the audience. The risk is misinterpretation; the reward is freedom from the flattening force of certainty.
Seen against the backdrop of a culture saturated with messages engineered for impact, his stance feels almost radical. Film can make slogans feel like truths. Ambiguity, deliberately built, refuses the slogan and restores complexity. It asks us to participate rather than submit, to dwell with questions rather than consume answers, and to experience cinema as a mode of thinking rather than a conduit for instruction.
His own work resists that trap by building ambiguity into form. The Qatsi trilogy, made with Philip Glass, offers no narration, dialogue, or conventional plot. It assembles juxtapositions of natural and industrial landscapes, slow motion and timelapse, human faces and machine rhythms, to provoke rather than conclude. Even when the Hopi word koyaanisqatsi suggests life out of balance, the films refuse to identify a single cause or cure. The absence of commentary is not a lack but an ethic: to remove the editorial finger that points and wags.
Ambiguity in this sense is not obscurity; it is an invitation to active reading. By withholding the apparatus of persuasion, Reggio opens room for the viewer’s own associations, doubts, and insights. In a medium that can overwhelm, he chooses to underdetermine, letting the meanings arise in the space between images and in the mind of the audience. The risk is misinterpretation; the reward is freedom from the flattening force of certainty.
Seen against the backdrop of a culture saturated with messages engineered for impact, his stance feels almost radical. Film can make slogans feel like truths. Ambiguity, deliberately built, refuses the slogan and restores complexity. It asks us to participate rather than submit, to dwell with questions rather than consume answers, and to experience cinema as a mode of thinking rather than a conduit for instruction.
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