Once Within a Time
Best known for his hypnotic collage documentary KOYAANISQATSI (1982) and its sequels, essay-film maverick Godfrey Reggio pushes his experimental style to new heights with this fable-like rumination on the perils of our current techno-dystopian age. Peppered with droll homages to Luis Buñuel, Georges Méliès and Stanley Kubrick, ONCE WITHIN A TIME plots a wordless, free-form narrative through multiple dazzling visual backdrops, from the Garden of Eden to the contemporary digital mediascape. Graced with a lustrous score by regular Reggio collaborator Philip Glass, plus the bold casting of boxer Mike Tyson as part of its colorful ensemble cast, this is a surreal, richly inventive fairy tale.
Aaron Kingsley Adetola, Brian Belott, Sussan Deyhim
- Notes From OscilloscopeGodfrey Reggio has spent his entire career creating oddball art that runs afoul of conventional, commercial moviemaking. ONCE WITHIN A TIME is a culmination of that career trajectory. With a filmography concerned with the ill that humanity wreaks on our planet, ONCE WITHIN A TIME is the cherry on top, both because it continues to address Reggio’s concerns and also because it does so in the sweetest way he’s employed to date—it’s playful, it’s funny, it’s filled with children. And it’s those children, and Reggio’s own childlike perspective, that make ONCE WITHIN A TIME not just an environmental polemic, but an uplifting vision of what the future could be.
