All of Godfrey Reggio's Institute for Regional Education public service announcement clips from 1974. Born in New Orleans in 1940, Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi) spent fourteen years with the Christian Brothers, living, as he put it, “in the Middle Ages.” Upon leaving the order in the 1970s, he was a founder of the Institute for Regional Education (IRE) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1974, Reggio began working on a mass media campaign of several short videos about technology and the use of surveillance to control human behaviour. Funded in part by the American Civil Liberties Union, the campaign included a graphic book inserted as a supplement to a Sunday newspaper complementing the public service announcements in the videos. Reggio later said that the message “worked beautifully in a non-narrative form.” ln 1975, Reggio began collaborating with cinematographer Ron Fricke to make Koyaanisqatsi, which was followed by the sequels Powaqatsi and Naqoyqatsi. These films expanded on the visual ideas he developed in his “Privacy Campaign” spots for the IRE. In his biographical references, Reggio sometimes presents himself as an inventor of a new visual style, but he was actually working from the same principles that Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand used when filming Manhattan in 1921. Koyaanisqatsi can be seen as an updating of the "city symphony” genre that also includes The Twenty-Four-Dollar Island (1927), A Bronx Morning (1931), and many others. Reggio was working with more sophisticated equipment, but his canvas was essentially the same. SOURCE: Daniel Eagan, “America's Film Legacy” (Bloomsbury, 2009). Public Service Announcements 1970s | Institute For Regional Education Koyaanisqatsi: https://amzn.to/3RzbBpg Qatsi Trilogy: https://amzn.to/3jycPV0 This channel is not monetized. All ads are run by the copyright owner.