Visitors

I'm not familiar with Godfrey Reggio's work, but looking him up, he's an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who likes to make movies that have no real plots and instead relies on silent videos and images, set to usually very haunting music. Visitors seems to continue that trend by making a movie that from a visual perspective is fascinating to look at, but from a sit down and watch perspective is a little harder to view. In many respects, this film is basically a challenge to watch, but I don't regret seeing it, because after watching this film, I'm more interested in looking up this man's work than I ever was before.

Visitors has no real plot. Instead it is a film that tries to reveal humanity's "trace-like" experience with technology, which, when commandeered by extreme emotional states, produces massive effects that are far beyond human reach. The film uses footage in black and white of people and places to try and get a particular feeling from the audience.

The films opening should be a warning for the audience. It features a shot of a gorilla played to dramatic music that slowly pans to a shot of what looks like the moon. The first ten or so minutes of the movie is shots of people, but they are very still. It's an impressive feat, considering these are real people, and not trained professional actors. Despite this they manage not to move a muscle, back or forth.

The film has recurring motifs. Shots of the outside of a building are shown ten times or more. The film also has interesting ways of shooting; a slow motion shot of a man yawning, a closeup of kids on what appears to be a merry go round, going back and fourth, a shot of just three heads and so on. There are a lot of fascinating things to watch from a film fan perspective.

The music can go from being slow and mystical, but then it becomes very overpowering, and in some ways, interrupts the film.

Visitors is an interesting experiment. Out of the all of the films I've seen this year, this is probably the most bizarre and surrealistic of all them all. No plot, but the film pulls me in, because of how it is made. I can't really recommended this film to everyone, but I can say, if you're interested in watching a movie that is basically images and music, then go right ahead.

It's been a real privilege to have followed Godfrey Reggio's work from Koyaanisqatsi (1982) until his latest, Visitors, a bold and profound continuation of his cinematic vision and dialogue.

Some of the readers of the reviews of this movie will hopefully see the particularly relevant irony of those who lividly complain about this movie being "boring, "slow", "uninteresting", "pointless", "a waste of time", "worst movie ever", "watch in fast forward mode!". They may never appreciate that the long takes of people's faces, seemingly in trances, are simply reflections of their own faces in the Reggio mirror. They are looking at themselves as they spend most of their awake time - visually plugged into their Wide Screen TVs, computer screens, video games, movie screens, smart phones, etc.. Immediate gratification, exuberant sensory stimulation and simple short answers frustratingly pervade these commentators as it does our now screen-based civilization.

With the ubiquity of screen-based existence, humanity has changed drastically in only a few decades. It's up to you to decide if that's good or bad but if you are familiar with Reggio's work, it can pretty much be summed up as his artistic rendering of the impact industry and technology has had on us - our species - spiritually, culturally, socially, individually, artistically, commercially etc, and importantly, the parallel impacts these changes have had on nature. The continuous visual juxtaposition between humans and animals, between dead buildings and dead landscapes are pure Reggio, beautiful yet deeply dark, illustrating this parallel both literally and in layers of metaphor and symbolism. The inability to sense or comprehend these layers is, as always, a limitation of the viewer, not the artist.

The movie itself, is bold in a number of ways.

Style-wise, it is Reggio's first all black & white feature with all or much of the background transformed to black and foreground detail replaced with blown out whites - visually stunning. The underlying themes are so effectively brought out with this style. The complete lack of colour further emphasizes the addiction of our culture to sensory extremes which induce pleasing and intense moods/mental states that do not require physical motion (other than to actuate a mouse or remote control) and only require our eyes to be open and lock into the screen interface.

But the true boldness is that the focus of his "critique" is not generally towards modern human civilization (industry, war, human exploitation, environmental exploitation, poverty, etc..) as in his previous work but this time, there is a personal element mixed in with the more familiar artistic diatribe against technology. This time, you look into the Reggio mirror, and you see yourself staring, blankly, quasi-comatose, right back at yourself. You are watching yourself.. watch yourself, and it's not pretty. An unsettling realization for each and every one of us.

Relax, perhaps a glass of wine, settle down for an hour and a half, douse pre-expectations, open your mind and experience another Reggio masterpiece. Ask yourself what 'Visitor' means… Buddhists already know.

I really liked the shot of the gorilla and also the buildings but I couldn't help but not care about the people so I went to write this review instead.

The pacing of the images adds up to a constant slow mo effect, which is nice but gets old quickly.

Being a Philip glass fan I can only like the music but to be fair I wouldn't put it on much by itself. I'd have rather liked to hear some crazy Einstein on the beach rhythms with these images, it might change the tempo and vibe a bit. Wait I can just listen to the album on my headphones and mute this.. later..

Well, this one certainly tested my patience. Director Reggio, known for his illustrious "Qatsi" trilogy, attempts to thematically explore humanity's relationship with modern technology through a series of miniature slow-motion clips. This mostly comprises of entranced faces staring directly at the camera, a dilapidated amusement park and overbearing concrete buildings. An eclectic selection of contemporary images one may find when watching the tape from 'Ringu'.

Ironically, Reggio portrays this documentary as a horror film, concluding his non-verbal art installation piece with images of deforestation, pollution and abandonment. Acting as a last resort to attempt to convey the apparent message of humanity's enslavement by technology causing the disinterest of our planet's welfare. Y'know what? It's condescending as hell! A pretentiously contemporaneous method of communicating an issue we are already aware of, except instead of actually displaying the dark side of civilisation, we are presented with an hour of faces. Hauntingly hypnotic? Definitely, particularly when accompanied by Glass' repetitive orchestral piece that further enhances the trance-like state when staring at a screen for an hour and a half. But absurdly ineffective due to the lasting power of these images being absent almost entirely.

Reggio could've condensed this down to thirty minutes and still have the same result. An additional hour of gormless eyes and general unhappiness is not going to further the director's point. Self-absorbing indulgence, I expected nothing less from an artist who is attempting to claw back his cult status from 'Koyaanisqatsi'. Heck, the images themselves aren't majestic enough to appreciate, unlike 'Samsara'. This is art. It's ambiguous. People will extrapolate something different out of it. Whilst some clips substantiated their purpose, notably the auditorium staring at an ape, most just had me rating faces out of ten due to their lack of impact in a message that should've been conveyed with more urgency.

It may be too strong of a word, but I liked KOYAANISQATSI and, to a lesser degree, NAQOYQATSI. Maybe I shouldn't use "like," when "appreciate" would be a more accurate description. For what it's worth, Godfrey Reggio has a distinct style of "documentary" filmmaking that combines images and music in interesting ways, and VISITORS is no different in that regard. Where this particular film failed for me is its extreme obliqueness and refusal to contextualize anything or even hint at a possible meaning. Perhaps it's my fault and I "just don't get it," but film appreciation goes both ways, and I shouldn't have to do all of the work. Still, however boring or unengaging I found it, the photography was nothing less than stunning and Philip Glass' music was excellent as usual. As for what's in the film, there was a lot of slow-motion close-ups of people's faces expressing a range of emotions, time-lapse photography of natural elements and man-made structures, a close-up of a gorilla, and aerial photography of the moon's surface. I suppose I could conjecture, based on what is shown and the title, that humanity is interconnected in our emotional expression as well as being "visitors" to Earth (in that we aren't here forever). There was also some juxtaposition between natural and artificial things, but that element was common in both of the previous Reggio films I watched. To be honest, I don't know quite what to make of VISITORS. It looks pretty and has a great score, but its meaning eludes me, and that's why I found it frustrating.