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Event Series Event Series: Godfrey Reggio Short Films

Godfrey Reggio Short Films

November 10, 2023 @ 9:00 pm

Playing in the CCA Studio

Playing daily Nov 17 – 23 5:30pm, 9:15pm (no screenings Monday & Tuesday, or Thanksgiving)

A full program of Godfrey Reggio’s Short Films curated by No Name Cinema’s Justin Clifford Rhody. The shorts program includes a 1974 Public Service Announcement for the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union (1974), Evidence (1995), Anima Mundi (1992), and a behind the scenes making of documentary on Once Within A Time (2023).

Program details:

  • PSA for The New Mexico Civil Liberties Union (1974, 6 min.)
  • Evidence (1995, 8 min.)
  • Anima Mundi (1992, 28 min.)
  • The Making of Once Within A Time (2023, 35 min.)

PSA for The New Mexico Civil Liberties Union: In 1972, Godfrey Reggio co-founded the Institute for Regional Education in Santa Fe, a non-profit foundation focused on media development, the arts, community organization and research. In 1974 and 1975, with funding from the American Civil Liberties Union, Reggio co-organized a multi-media public interest campaign on the invasion of privacy and the use of technology to control behavior. The campaign included billboards, print ads, a thirty-eight-page newspaper (copies of which are available for FREE in the CCA theater lobby) and a series of jarring public service announcements which were regularly broadcast on television…

“[The public service campaign] was right after the Watergate hearings started. My colleagues [and I] felt that was just the tip of the iceberg, that in fact all Americans had dossiers kept on them by credit agencies and government agencies; and that the technologies developed for the moon [landing] and Vietnam were translated into technology used to control behavior or to put surveillance on the population. The motto of that campaign, which was done in 1974, was “Ten Years and Counting”—we were anticipating of course Orwell’s 1984. What we experience now was already solidly in place during that time, it’s just that people didn’t have much attention for it. Now, it’s inescapable. It’s lamentable that people accept it as the price we pay for the pursuit of our technological happiness.” — Godfrey Reggio

Evidence looks into the eyes of children watching television – in this case Walt Disney’s “Dumbo”. Though engaged in a daily routine, they appear drugged, retarded, like the patients of a mental hospital. Evidence is about the behavior of children watching television – an activity whose physiological aspects have been overlooked in the current controversy surrounding television… Unlike people in a movie theatre, where images are projected onto a screen, television viewers become prey to the television’s own light impulses, they go into an altered state – a transfixed condition where the eyes, the mind, the breathing of the subject is clearly under the control of an outside force. In a poetic sense and without exaggerating one might say that the television technology is eating the subjects who sit before its gaze… The phenomenon recorded in Evidence relates not to programming or software, but to the medium itself – television the household appliance, the cathode ray tube, the radiation gun aimed at the viewer. This gun can be reasonably compared to a tractor beam that holds its subjects in total control. The physical, spiritual and social consequences of this phenomenon are subject to debate.”

Anima Mundi: Commissioned by Bulgari, the Italian jewelry company, and the World Wildlife Fund “to create a biological diversity manifesto,” Reggio crafted an ode to the beauty, majesty, diversity and interconnectedness of the natural world. Accompanied by Glass’ music, the film intertwines breathtaking footage—both existing and original—of animals on land, underwater and in the air. The title refers to Plato’s concept of the world as an overarching, living being with a soul and intelligence.

The Making of Once Within A Time offers a behind-the-scenes look into the concepts, collaborations, and technology used to create Reggio’s newest film.

Director: Godfrey Reggio
Program total run time: 1 hr. 17 min.

Read more about CCA’s Godfrey Reggio retrospective here.

$13

Note: Tickets are only $3.00 for EBT cardholders

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Santa Fe, NM 87505 United States
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