>> Funding for COLORES was provided in part by Frederick Hammersley Fund For The Arts New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund And the Nellita E. Walker fund for KNME TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation New Mexico Arts a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs by the National Endowment for the Arts and Viewers Like You [Music] >> Godfrey Reggio: If you want to do Miracles, it happens in media now.

This is where the altar is.

Where the candelabra is.

Where the, you know, the incense burns and where all the holy rollers and the believers go to cinema.

I mean the Golden Cathedral and wherever it is in California looks like a big movie theater on steroids.

It's all a show.

So, What are movies?

Picture shows.

Let's do a little crafting.

Let's insert our contra into the vascular structure of the beast.

[Music] >> Godfrey Reggio: I would say that we are programmed to remember to forget... ...that all of a sudden without realizing it, all human beings exited reality [Music] And so Once Within A Time tries to chronicle that event.

It chronicles us living in a fantasy world.

So, this is a fantasy of the real.

It's about a world that is burning as I speak.

I'm not being extreme.

I'm not being extreme enough but on a vital planet and the children who are not of the future, they are the future.

They are the ones that are in play as we allure them.

Buy and sell them on the net.

The real battlefield.

[Music] >> Reggio: The origins of Once Within A Time began right after Anima Mundi was done and surprisingly it became a hit with children.

So, it made me start thinking, "what do you do with kids?"

So, you color it.

You dress it in things that kids understand because the child today understands more than you think.

In one day they will absorb more visualization than a child in the Middle Ages during their entire life.

That's war.

This has got to stop.

[CHATTER] [MUSIC] >> Reggio: Children live in a liminal zone.

Not a rational zone.

They're in that threshold between this and that.

Here we want to offer them a door.

They're being bought and sold.

They're the ones that have all the consequence of our future which is present in front of us now and we don't see it cuz we're too busy consuming and protecting and ensuring and vacationing and eating and casinoing and God knows what.

[Music] >> Reggio: They're just so innocent.

They're like the innocent lamb.

You don't want to slaughter this lamb, okay, their mind doesn't exist rationally.

They ask their parents about mystical things like the stars.

Why are we here or why are we doing that to those people?

And they know more than we do.

A kid born today will have witnessed things that no child should ever witness, ever.

They are watermarked, they tattoo the soul of the child and oh it's just TV and they go to bed with these horror shows.

Criminal acts.

[Music] >> Reggio: The children, these are the children come to play.

They're with the other children that we have in this film.

Both have a round head.

Nature, 369.

Kesler says, in those numbers are the spherical nature of the universe, the Big Bang, gravity's rainbow all wrapped up.

[Music] >> Reggio: The square, however, is technology.

That's the sign.

There is no right angle in nature.

So, the boy becomes taken over by the app and most of the time he's wearing his round bubble but in his square.

Now this could be telling you more about me than the subject but intrinsically we see the difference between the circle and the square.

So, we want to get that square within the circle.

[Music] >> Reggio: Mother Muse has a crown of roots.

Mother Muse is the person that's telling us that we have the tree upside down.

[Music] >> Reggio: And then we have a criminal, as famous as Jesus, Mohammad, all of them put together, Mike Tyson, and he's seeing his faulty ways, acknowledged them and he knew that his faults were his biggest correctors.

He and she would propose as heroes for the children.

The tense of this film is the future-present.

Just think about it, it's worth spending a moment.

The future is not something way down the line.

Like Dylan says, "it's blowing in the wind."

That's what prophets do.

They talk about what's present.

So, the future is present and that future tells us that all of us have now undergone a gender change and none of us have noticed it.

We've gone from chimp to human to cyborg.

Our miracles are our infirmity and we shall be the last to know.

Kinety says all of a sudden, without realizing it, like on that car, in The Shining, coming around humankind, went out of reality.

Once Within A Time is about that fantasy of this real.

[Music] >> Reggio: This is a hope not of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, it's the hope of those that have the courage to resist destiny in order to create their own world.

So, this is not a fairy tale with audible ethical heroes and monsters and always with a friendly ending.

This is a bardic tale for those that dare to resist destiny because it is they who could create their own world so it's not a happy ending it's a resolute beginning.

Our world is our range of relationship.

The Gizmo is more impactful than any group of terrorists or even the American Military.

It is our way of life.

It produces what we signify.

It's the big high that we're all on, once within this time.

>> Sussan Deyhim: I'm grateful to be part of this project and especially as Mother Muse.

So, I'll try to do something improvised uh using the uh energies of this sacred land.

[Music] >> Michael Kamins: We have tons of media right now totally devoted to telling those stories and nothing's changing.

Are you hoping that you can create more awareness and make a difference and get people to really respond?

>> Godfrey Reggio: Everybody in the world will hear what I have to say.

Now, of course, that's a shout of a mad man, but I feel that way and I feel with my collaborators how being sober as can be, we don't have any answers, but we've offered an opportunity of not a movie, a book for the dystopian age to read to children.

So, it says what our words can no longer say.

It shows the kids what they already know.

So, these are tears of hope and joy.

[MUSIC] >> Reggio: I never intended to be a filmmaker for sure.

I felt that the world I lived in was mentally insane.

[MUSIC] >> Reggio: So, I want to show, as a metaphor but a megaphone, digital tidal waves ontological earthquakes.

The splitting of the blue valiance above us into the black of space.

These are no longer metaphors, they're real but we don't see them because we only pay attention to what, how I look, what I need, how I feel, ordinary daily living.

The plummeting of this world.

[CHATTER] >> Reggio: It's a clarion call for hope that those that have the courage to be hopeless.

Please, this is hope against hope, okay, it's those that are willing to not try to fix this, but to change the way we live, to be heroic.

The Greeks say, "no destiny may not be overcome."

The children may resist destiny.

They don't walk down the yellow brick road.

They're walking on the Via Aurelia of gizmos, zero ones, that's the hope.

[Music] >>Reggio: Anything that can be done will be done.

Andy Grove said that about technology, anything that can be done will be done.

It has a voice of its own, has its own imperatives, which means, it makes the moves, it creates the music, its truth becomes our truth God, help us.

[CHATTER] [Music] >> Reggio: I believe that art should enter the conversation, science, technology, education, church, etc.

But art has been given no voice at the table.

It's been taken over by the art Mafia, the con artist, to show us the beauty of light, but rarely its truth, and certainly not its good, except for profit.

So, art should have a voice at the table of our public trough.

>> John Kane: Hello Santa Fe, it's great to be here love it thank you guys so much.

Look at all the Santa Feans here.

It's going to be a great screening.

>> Reggio: That trough today is Cinema, the moving image.

It is there that is the public green, where the conversation perhaps could take place.

The world we live in however, words tend to separate us.

We live in a world where the word, the symbol, the sign, no longer describes the world we live in.

When that happens, we have this unique blue star, I would call it opportunity to have the visual rename the word, the symbol, the sign, the new language is the language of visualization co-opted by every advertising agent on the planet.

You create your own language.

>> Reggio: We employ a grammatical form.

It has a tense, it has a subject, has a verb, and it has an object.

The form never and the time is the future present the subject is unspeakable, it's happening now, it's the collapse of the planet, and the beautiful vital earth, the verb is the children to be, their destiny and the clarion call is once within a time to action.

The form is the dream.

I wanted to always work through experiences that you have.

So, it's not a metaphor, it's the big megaphor of this process, and in a dream things aren't literal.

One is not continuous to the other, yet it all is, it's all different yet and you wake up, what just happened to me?

Where was I?

What did I hear?

Was it in black and white?

Color?

Was it telling me something?

Every image, 472 images in this 51 minutes, okay, every image has 33 layers of painting.

You can't see it all at once.

This is how we dream.

It's all layered.

This is what art is.

It's not a quick read like an advert for Coca-Cola, it's buried.

You have to find it.

It doesn't just pop out at you, you have to suffer a little bit.

Art is an infliction to purgate the soul.

[Room tone] >> Reggio: The approach I use is all over my room right here, I clear my mind.

I become still in my senses.

The stiller you are, the more receptive you are, and I go to the board and I start to examine.

I do an artopsy of the word, and the word is made flesh so it provokes all these images in me.

I draw them, I write them down and with my co-director John Kane, he can translate that.

That's the process I use and always with people more talented than myself.

I means we.

>> Please join me in a warm welcome for Godfrey Regio.

>> Reggio: And with that, I'm going to now receive not a Lifetime Achievement Award, I'm on my thousandth month, and I'm going to receive a half a-lifetime because I don't do fairy tales I do bardic fairy tales have happy endings.

I'm going to do a resolute beginning.

Thank you.

>> Paul Barns: What's so striking to me about the film, it's like you went back to the beginning of film.

>> John Kane: We started with a book of stills from the firsthand colored films from the 1890s.

It was a matter of, how do we do that digitally, hand painting and the whole thing so it was a lot of experimenting and a lot of um discovering of techniques and things and stuff right and uh but that was the idea from the beginning.

But we did literally build, you know, the sets so it was a combination of handmade analog things that we then put together, you know, in the with the help of the computer to try to blend them together and still have it have a handmade, you know, feeling.

>> Barns: The film is also filled with amazing images.

It's just, how do you come up with these ideas like the hourglass with the people inside?

>> Reggio: Being as stoned as possible.

>> Kane: The hourglass image with the with the people inside has been in the books that Godfrey's been making and developing in the film since the beginning.

>> Barns: But essentially what you do is you create an image book then.

You create, you collect images, a mood book.

>> Kane: There are some sort of totem images that we have in ideas and then, you know, it goes off from.

>> Barns: Also the soundtrack is amazing.

It's the combination of Philip Glass's music, your Iranian singer, the soundtrack is as multi- layered as the images are.

>> Kane: Philip comes to the studio and he watches a lot of material, he came to a lot of the shoots and then he goes off and he and he writes and we get you know the material back and then in doing that we'll make some images and then experiment with some sound and goes back and forth and back and forth and then the process, you know, makes this stew and we arrive at this seemingly very complicated thing, which it is, but it wasn't something that we thought up, it thought us up, but we don't edit to the music, you know, in other words the music and the picture are made in tandem but when they come together the audience, in watching it, makes the connection and that's hopefully why the film become a personal experience.

>> Reggio: When I grew up as a kid, all the kids around me collected baseball cards but my mother, God bless her, and her name is Mary Magdalene for real, Mary Magdalene, my mother, prayed the rosary, lightning, she'd freak out, she gave me holy cards.

So, when I went into the brothers, I wanted to be a Saint.

A Saint.

Holy cards.

You become who you admire.

So, now my greatest act is to create holy cards for others to exchange.

Those are the little films that I created.

That's what I really want to do and now you got my secret.

>> Kamins: Last question.

What age is this?

>> Godfrey Reggio: I presented you a visual, I presented you a sound, together create a language which asks you the question.

Which age is this now?

The sunset or the dawn?

I want to just add a postscript, it's always darkness or the dawn.

We may resist destiny.

That's it.

I can have a cigarette.

>> Kamins: We want to do some room tone.

Real quick.

Okay.

Thank you.

We got it.

>> Reggio: Did I do too many stutters or anything?

>> NMPBS Crew: Great.

You were great.

>> Reggio: Say that again.

Wait, what he say?

>> Crew: You were great, you were amazing.

>> Reggio: There you go.

That's what you want to hear.

That's it >> Funding for COLORES was provided in part by Frederick Hammersley fund for the Arts New Mexico PBS great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation New Mexico Arts a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs by the National Endowment for the Arts and Viewers Like You