Let me make one thing very clear: I am not a philosophy girlie. If you were to sit me in a debate hall with a bunch of philosophy majors, I would suffer a pain comparable to being roasted alive on a thousand burning coals. On the other hand, the history of the philosophers themselves? Sure! Socrates and his ‘why,’ Sun Tze and the Art of War, everything Frantz Fanon wrote, the list goes on. I often question if philosophy and philosophers have anything of actual depth to say, or were they just men with far too much time on their hands. Thankfully, The Great History of Western Philosophy, Mexican filmmaker Aria Covamonas’ animated experiment, has a very similar approach to its subject matter.
The Great History of Western Philosophy (La gran historia de la filosofia occidental) is a chaotic “anti-narrative” work that presents a loose tall tale of a cosmic animator tasked with making an “educational philosophical film,” on the behalf of the Central Committee. A hog in various military uniforms is introduced as the animator, representing the monk Xuanzang from the Chinese classic epic Journey to the West. Mao Zedong and Sun Wukong the Monkey King also feature, alongside an endless list of philosophers turned into visual jokes and spectacle. Collated from a cleverly constructed selection of public domain photographs and cut-outs, the jarring paper-doll-esque visual style is striking and disorientating. Interspersed live footage, edited stock, live static and more takes up the screen, like a high school collage come to life in ACMI Cinema 2. It is a visual assault and a genuine work of art, all at once.
I cannot even begin to explain how batshit insane this film is. It opens with a cat in a pinafore playing the drums speaking Mandarin which is then incorrectly subtitled as “DO NOT ATTEMPT TO REASON WITH THIS MOVIE.” Much of the humour in the film came from its deliberate misdirection in the subtitles. Mandarin, English, and Spanish dialogue alike was accompanied with surreal mistranslations. I can only imagine what the experience of watching the film as a Mandarin-speaker would have been.
On the film’s subject matter, it goes so far beyond its own critique that I severely doubt reason was ever a priority in the process of creation. The film is grotesque and macabre, absurd and silly, beyond any and all logical sense. Examples include: Mao Zedong cleaning his rival’s doll house, crying to the camera “may censorship save me!;” an extended sequence of Socrates receiving CPR from an elephant after drowning in a bathtub; Mickey Mouse indulging in cannibalism; and a brief reimaging of French playwright Alfred Jarry’s 1896 pre-absurdist parody Ubu Roi starring Ayn Rand and Fredrich Nietzsche. Each nonsequiteur is more bizarre than the last. Even its characters are aware of their own absurdity. When the aforementioned elephant gets caged up by the communist party it says to its friend “man I should never have listened to the animators.”
Five minutes into the film, I was already feeling my head hang heavy, as if I was about to fall asleep. While the film entertained me for the most part, its dense and purposefully obscure take on the subject matter made it difficult to fully concentrate. For every absurdist joy there was a philosophical fallacy, an impenetrable reference that pushed my confusion to near-boredom. Yet, I could not tear my eyes away from the chaos unfolding before me. There were a few walkouts and multiple intervals of filmgoers laughing at philosophy jokes I didn’t quite understand. Ultimately, it’s a film with heart, a thoroughly damaged one but a heart nonetheless. As I was leaving the cinema, the person sitting next to me turned to their friends to say “that was nonsense…the film was like that because Western Philosophy is that, complete utter nonsense.” While I may be paraphrasing, I cannot help but find myself in agreement.
The Great History of Western Philosophy ran at MIFF 2025 Monday 11th August and Monday 18th