- Visitors
I’m glad to have seen Godfrey Reggio’s feature-length montage Visitors on a big screen (it’s currently playing at the Landmark Century Centre), even though I didn’t particularly care for the movie on the whole. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s critique of Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi seems equally applicable here (“This quasi-mystical documentary is largely a dull rehash of ideas given infinitely better realization in Vertov’s The Man With the Movie Camera and many other experimental films of the 20s”), as does Fred Camper’s assessment of Baraka, a like-minded project by Reggio’s former collaborator Ron Fricke (“With a few exceptions . . . shots are slapped together, interacting neither visually nor conceptually”). Reggio has said that Visitors is about human beings’ relationship to technology, though what (if anything) he has to impart on this theme is never clear. The succession of long takes—skyscrapers, the lunar surface, and transfixed faces in close-up being some of the more frequent subjects—lacks any sense of development, so that the movie doesn’t seem to conclude, but simply stop.
