Monk-turned-director Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass arrive with “Visitors,” a video installation which would be much more appropriate screening in a museum, where you could just get up and move along to the next gallery when you’ve had enough.
The 1983 film “Koyaanisqatsi,” by far Reggio’s most famous, used majestic pans and time-lapse photography, set to the declarative repetitions of Glass’ score, to hammer (and hammer and hammer and hammer) at the message: We humans were given a beautiful planet to play with, and just look what we’ve done with it.
At first, “Visitors” seems to promise that Reggio is going to lay off his fellow bipeds for a bit, in that it consists largely of lengthy close-ups of human faces. But his hand is tipped when the camera starts crawling up the sides of bleak office towers and squats for a good long look at deserted fairgrounds. Aha, could it be that we humans are only visitors here, that our work and our play will one day be as so much planetary dust?
Sure, “Visitors” is pretty, very pretty. So was “Koyaanisqatsi,” until it (deservingly) became the template for dozens of TV ads seeking that touch of art. Many of the children whose faces are shown in the film were shot as they looked at video games; their expressions suggest that whatever they were watching was a lot more fascinating than this.