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A spiritual angle on ecology at Ecofilms
June 30, 2005
Ecofilms,
the international film festival on ecology which took place in
rodos, Greece from June 21 to June 26, offered a broad
perspective on how we protect and nurture life. Trying to
capture what are really life and consciousness is part of that
angle, and that's precisely the spiritual question the
documentary Monte Grande by Franz Reichle tries to
answer.
In this film screened during the festival in
the open air Rodon theater, the Swiss director follows
philosopher and scientist Francisco Varela (1946 – 2001). The
brilliant man, after scientific studies at Harvard University
in the United States dedicated his life to find bridges
between science and art, western and eastern thought and
helped shape modern cognitive sciences. His thought is clear
and convincing and its an immense strength of the film not to
paraphrase the thinker but rather let him explain his ideas in
his own words. The director chose between 300 hours of
material, from archives of the conferences given by the
philosopher, to a personal interview the filmmaker had with
Varela before his death in 2001 and with his relatives. The
thinking is so rich, yet perfectly clear, that a DVD abum with
5 discs will be released in 2006 to complete the
documentary.
In order not to present it in a too abrupt and
rational way, the director went back and forth from segments
of conferences, to interviews with relatives, to moments in
the family house in Monte Grande, Chile. To make it clearer,
Reichle, who began his career as a graphic designer, used
colored interstitials to introduce each of these three themes
choosing respectively the primary colors red, yellow and blue
to identify them. Yet the cards are not randomly shuffled and
the film broadly follows the evolution of Varela's thought as
it was shaped by different events that had a deep impact on
his life and his ideas. At each of these periods, his
relatives give their own insight into his personality. In a
first stage, at the beginning of his career as a scholar,
Varela explains the basics of his synthetic thought. In a
second step, the coup d'Etat in Chile deeply affected his
perception of logic and rationality. Finally, his cancer made
him more tolerant of the others and conscious of the frailty
of life, till it finally killed him.
The film
definitely incites us to discover more about this man who
tried to reconcile western and eastern thought, a theme that
the director had already began to explore in his previous film
The knowledge of healing (1997), and that he now brilliantly
deepens.
Olivier Delesse
Full
coverage of Ecofilms 2005 on filmfestivals.com :
Ecofilms'
opening stroke a sensitive chord
A
decent factory tackles corporate responsibility at
Ecofilms
Ecofilms
also gives room to short films
Ecofilms
grants a Medwet award for the second year
A
spiritual angle on ecology at Ecofilms
Ecofilms
presents an experimental answer to poverty in
doc
Consumer
society under the spotlight at Ecofilms with Czech
Dream
rodos
Golden Deers
Awards
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