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(HAUNTING GUITAR REFRAIN)
Visitors is a film by Godfrey Reggio,
who is a filmmaker who does really unusual films
that have no text, no dialogue, it's all imagery.
He's done a number of these films, the most famous, and the first one,
is called Koyaanisqatsi, which means "life out of balance",
and this is a movie that sort of pioneered
a whole new genre of filmmaking in the early '80s,
and it's about the way we live that has not really changed.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
Visitors is the first major film from him
since he finished The Qatsi Trilogy,
and it is an exploration in kind of a different way.
It's about what he calls the reciprocal gaze,
that we watch the film
but the film watches us.
The reason that he says that
is that a great portion of the film is faces looking straight at the camera
that he filmed in kind of an unusual way
through having them watch something
and having a camera positioned behind a two-way mirror
so that they could appear to be staring straight at the camera, which they are,
but they didn't see the camera.
They were watching television, they were playing video games,
they were watching a computer screen and doing things,
and you watch them in a way that is really kind of unique.
(HAUNTING MUSIC)
The audience has to make cohesion for themselves
because the film itself is just what it is,
there's no narrative at all.
One of the things that's really unusual is that the cuts are very long.
Visitors has only 74 cuts in the whole film,
which means there's less than one cut per minute,
so there's just long shots and long shots and long shots.
The overall pace is very slow. Everything is filmed in slow-motion.
There's nothing in real time. (HAUNTING MUSIC)
The audio side of it is that he got, again, Philip Glass to write the score,
and Philip Glass has created a score that is paced similarly.
It's a very, very slow-moving score that develops very gradually.
I'm here to conduct it with a live orchestra,
and so this, also the way that the music was written,
it had to be written for an orchestra
that could be, you know, assembled easily,
so we want the same ensemble for the whole film.
It enhances the experience,
because you're sharing not only just the imagery and the music
but you're sharing a performance, also.
(HAUNTING MUSIC)
It's really out of time, just as the image is.
It's about... It's pure music.
It doesn't really relate to a period that I see, you know.
The title Visitors is, you know, basically that we are the visitors.
We are what we are, but we're here just temporarily.
And I think Visitors will last a long time.
I don't think it's going to seem dated ever,
because it focuses on people studying other people
and people studying the world, nature
and how we are in this world,
and none of that is related to any particular era.