Mao Zedong, Socrates, Mickey Mouse, Ayn Rand, elephants, and echoes of Monty Python in a Dadaist animation film – that is one way to describe Mexican filmmaker Aria Covamonas’ first feature, The Great History of Western Philosophy (La gran historia de la filosofía occidental). But most descriptions won’t even come close to properly capturing this rollercoaster ride of public domain creativity, getting its world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR) on Wednesday.
“A cosmic animator incurs the wrath of the Central Committee and is sentenced to create a philosophical film under the unyielding gaze of Chairman Mao – who swiftly condemns them to death,” explains a synopsis on the IFFR website about the Tiger Competition entry. “Chaos ensues, resulting in a wildly imaginative animated feature that collides popular and high culture, brimming with absurd mischief and references spanning from classical Greek thought to Mickey Mouse and Disney.”
And it concludes that the film is “a witty, anarchic work of revisionism, gleefully dismantling sacrosanct ideas and traditions. Aria Covamonas’ exuberant creation might just have Bertrand Russell rolling in his grave – not from outrage, but from uncontrollable laughter.”
A nonsense-loving Dadaist approach also means that the film features spoken words taken from film and other sources, with parts being in Chinese. Plus, music and sound design, reminiscent of vinyl recordings, add a retro feel to The Great History of Western Philosophy, which expands on ideas that Covamonas explored in the 2021 short Socrates’ Adventures in the Underground and an aesthetic also recognizable in I Can’t Go On Like This (2023) and Hideouser and Hideouser (2019).
How did the filmmaker go about making the movie? “There was no script for this movie but a method, a method that works with an imaginary machine with a set of rules. This comes from certain ideas in psychoanalysis, specifically from Lacanian psychoanalysis (one of whose core ideas is that subjectivity is constructed through language and meaning is never fully fixed). We have this perception or intuition that tells us that when we say a word, there is a meaning to that word. But it doesn’t work like that. And I wanted to recreate kind of that chain of significance through pictures and sound bits.”
So Covamonas used a method similar to metric poetry or music in making the movie. “I used two-second units, and each two-second element is sound, image, and color. And then I add another two seconds. So the idea is to elaborate on this imaginary machine that is analogous to how we understand, or we believe – maybe we are completely wrong, how the subconscious mind works.”
The creative compares the result to dreams that assemble pieces of memories and words into something new. The process sounds like a lot of work. “It’s very, very labor intensive,” Covamonas acknowledges. “The advantage is that I do two units, meaning four seconds a day, and those four seconds then are finished. You don’t have to go back to them, there is no post-production.”
Why does Mickey Mouse, which entered the public domain last year, feature in The Great History of Western Philosophy? “I am a big advocate of the public domain and of limiting copyright. This was kind of a celebration of that,” the filmmaker tells THR before speaking out against current copyright rules. “How copyright exists today is absurd and only benefits the exploiters, not the people who make the work. Nobody deserves to own something for 100 years. 10, 20 years – like patents – would be reasonable. You create something, you can exploit it to get money. It is fair to get paid for your work for an amount of time, not 100 years.”
‘The Great History of Western Philosophy’
Courtesy of International Film Festival Rotterdam
By the way, Mickey doesn’t look his usual happy self in The Great History of Western Philosophy. “Yes, as you see in the film, Mickey Mouse is rotten and worthless really, because it was in the copyright pool for 100 years. The point is you have to liberate ideas for the public because nobody does anything in a vacuum. Everything you do is based on someone else, and nobody deserves to own anything for 100 years. I think that is excessive.”
Why do Mao and other Chinese characters and themes get a spotlight in the movie? Well, The Feminist Five, as they have become known, play a key role here. This group of Chinese feminists was arrested in Beijing on March 6, 2015, for 37 days for planning to hand out stickers against sexual harassment on the subway ahead of International Women’s Day. “They were accused of being international agents and a crime that is called picking quarrels and causing trouble. The doctor who first warned of the outbreak of COVID was (called in by the authorities) for the same reason. I read that news, and I wanted to make a movie that is in the spirit of picking quarrels and looking for trouble. And Mao just kind of got lucky that he was picked as the figure of authoritarianism to mock and to make fun of. But he stands for every authoritarian.”
There is also a more practical reason. “I found this pool of Chinese movies from before the (Cultural) Revolution in the public domain that was very useful. There are also American B-movies that enter the public domain because they needed to renew the copyright and failed to do so.”
No, Covamonas doesn’t know any Chinese. “I don’t understand Chinese,” they explain. “So, in this movie, Chinese fulfills the function of a dream language. I cut it where it sounds like it makes rhythmic sense. So, I am very curious what Chinese-speaking people will think.”
The filmmaker also tells THR that the world needs Dadaism now just like it did when the anti-establishment art movement first emerged in the early 20th century. “One key reason to be of Dada was that the world is crazy,” Covamonas said. “There was a war (World War I), and a lot of people died. What is the logic of that? What are reason, logic, and civilization good for it if we end like that? Dada says to hell with everything. We don’t need art. We don’t need civilization because it’s good for nothing. And I sometimes feel like that nowadays. We are heading for disaster. Explicitly fascist leaders are getting elected. There is genocide committed by countries that are considered internationally recognized countries. What is reason good for? Maybe we just need to be absurd.”
Recent entertainment industry news, namely the death of a legendary filmmaker, also made the Mexican creative emotional. “I was very sad to hear about the death of David Lynch. I love his movies,” they shared. “He is another very, very strong influence. You always have to feel his movies. He said that when you listen to music, don’t rack your brain with what it means, what it tries to tell you. No, listen to the music, find the beats, and feel how they resonate with you. It is the same with his movies. And it is the same with my work. Whatever you get is that. You are not missing some secret or misunderstanding things.”
Covamonas also has a dream project they hope to get to do in the future. “There is an adaptation I would like to make but I don’t have the elements to make it yet. It’s Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre – the first eight chapters, the childhood. I love the adaptations that the Brothers Quay make. So that is my dream movie to make.”
Watch a trailer for The Great History of Western Philosophy here.
