30
Jan/14

VISITORS

30
Jan/14
Triska in VISITORS

The Bronx Zoo’s Triska is the highlight of Godfrey Reggio’s latest collaboration with Jon Kane and Philip Glass

VISITORS (Godfrey Reggio, 2013)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
Opened Friday, January 24
212-330-8182
www.visitorsfilm.com
www.landmarktheatres.com

Concept trumps execution in Godfrey Reggio’s latest cinematic collaboration with composer Philip Glass and editor Jon Kane. For his first film in more than ten years — his last feature was 2002’s Naqoyqatsi: Life as War, the follow-up to 1988’s Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation and 1982’s Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance — Reggio has set his sights on the people who live on a planet that is facing destruction. Visitors consists of seventy-four shots in eighty-seven minutes, from close-ups of men, women, children, and Bronx Zoo female gorilla Triska against stark black backgrounds to scenes of massive garbage dumps, tall buildings, the moon and the earth, and the swamps of Reggio’s home state, Louisiana. His goal is to affect viewers’ sensation, emotion, and perception while revealing a new order of the ages: novus ordo seclorum, as it says right on the dollar bill. Unfortunately, his grand plans fall severely short, as Visitors ends up being a slow-moving, repetitious, and rather dull journey through often inexplicably linked scenes. Reggio is hoping for viewers to create their own individual narrative — there are no spoken words or descriptive text in the film, only Glass’s wonderful score, which the composer developed by joining Reggio and Kane at many of the shoots — but it’s all too disjointed and scattered. There are some spectacular moments — especially when Triska stares directly into the camera for several minutes — but it never comes together to form a unified whole, evoking the odd triumvirate of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Godley and Crème’s 1985 video for “Cry,” and even a little bit of Mummenschanz. Visitors is currently playing at the Landmark Sunshine; you can catch the Quatsi trilogy and a pair of short works, Anima Mundi and Evidence, from January 13 through March 14 in the Museum of Arts and Design film series “Life with Technology: The Cinema of Godfrey Reggio.”