Godfrey Reggio's first film in 10 years, Visitors, had its NYC premiere at the Museum of the Moving Image this past Sunday. Reggio, composer Phillip Glass (who scored the film in what marks their sixth collaboration together), producer/associate director Jon Kane, and presenter Steven Soderbergh were all in attendance for the screening, which took place in part of the MoMI’s First Look showcase.

30 years since Koyaanisqatsi—the first in what is usually referred to as the Qatsi trilogy, though the films are non-narrative and non-sequential, they are tied together in style and content, as well as by the Hopi suffix which translates to "life"—comes Visitors. Like the Qatsi films, Visitors contains no dialogue or narration. More on Qatsi here. A colleague once sent me the to the score for "inspiration".

Visitors very much continues in Reggio's tradition of exploring themes of technology, artificiality, extension, prothesis, nature and humanity with an unflinching, existentialist, and satisfied vigor. Visitors fades from black into the first shot of Triska, a Lowland Gorilla from the Bronx Zoo that Reggio chose over a chimpanzee because of the former's more humanoid facial features.

We note here a spoiler warning, and wonder how much can be spoiled in a wordless, slow-motion, black and white film with only 74 shots.

In the first act, faces hypnotically mix with time-lapsed building facades as the day passes and the clouds move and the light shifts and shines and shades. In the second act, we see disembodied appendages—hands mostly—typing and swiping and tapping a solid surface. What they are doing (*COMPUTERS*) is pretty clear. A sea of people walking in and out of focus, haunting images of an abandoned amusement park, marshlands of Louisiana, and more faces, this time performing for us—laughing, crying, screaming, smiling— all follow. It is a movie about benign looking. It might be nostalgic for something.

We come to arrive precisely where we sit, retroactively putting the faces together as our own while the camera pans out to reveal a theatre of subjects staring at the face of Triska, the backs of their heads looking ridiculous, until the screen whites out. At the beginning, the camera sweeps over the surface of the moon. At the end, we've circumnavigated the moon and Earth appears over the horizon, suspended in space.

The shots hold for upwards of a minute, but in ultra-slow-mo, and the effect is disorienting—these faces move, but imperceptibly. They don't shift fast enough to register, nor do they stay static enough to appear fixed. They are spooky because they move when you aren’t looking, but you are never not looking. They also look right at you, but that doesn’t seem like a revelation—Reggio probably isn't dicking around YouTube much.

Reggio likes to talk, and for better or worse, has a coherent logic to his approach towards filmmaking and a strong philosophy behind the work he produces. For worse: it functions as a nice microcosm for the direction of potential (ideological, discursive) critiques: he shot it in cutting-edge 4K digital resolution (standard HD is about 1K pixels), and though the use of black and white was a deliberate choice (it “immediately moves the viewer out of their primary frame of reference to the world,” Reggio stated) all it required was a button click in post.

For Reggio, technology is all about (the destruction and failure of) language, but what about looking? What about images themselves? An issue such as this is symptomatic of the deliberate, seemingly flippant framing that neglects all or most other decisions the film required.

I don’t know anything about music, but Phillip Glass’s score is quite nice, ominously and anachronistically modern. Reggio’s maybe-polemic on technology is sometimes perplexing and never as neat as he thinks. That takes away from the film, which is arresting and awesome and important and different nonetheless. Time passes in an odd, hallucinatory, contemplative way; it is over by the time you begin thinking about it. You don't watch it, exactly, as much as you are consumed by it—Reggio rightly calls it "experiential film." You should see it.

Visitors is opening at the Sunshine Cinema on January 24th. Reggio and Kane will be answering questions after the 7:00 p.m. showings on the 24th and the 25th, as well as introducing the 9:45 showing both days. More information here. First Look at MoMI runs until Sunday, January 19th.