This PhD in the Arts offers an in-depth reflection on the thoughts and creative process of his film N, The Madness of Reason.
The film addresses the confrontation between the Western mind and African reality and spirituality (primarily West Africa). The film's starting point is the life and work of French encyclopedist Raymond Borremans (1906-1988) who wrote Le grand Encyclopédie de la Côte d'Ivoire. His goal was to objectify and systematize African reality. He spent his life working on it, however at the time of his death, he had only reached the letter N.
The PhD is conceived as a triptych whose center panel consists of the film itself and the two side panels with texts that attempt to reveal the film in different ways. The first panel traces the research, thought and creative process of the film N, The Madness of Reason. We reconstruct the thoughts of the filmmaker, from the original idea to its completion, and this from different perspectives: (1) a historical perspective: who was Raymond Borremans? (2) an epistemological perspective: in what respect does the work subscribe to the encyclopedic tradition of the Enlightenment? (3) a sociological-anthropological perspective: to what extent does Borremans' spirit reflects itself in contemporary West Africa? (4) a spiritual perspective: how can the spiritual dimension of reality be represented in a non-cognitive and non-colonial way (5) a political perspective: is there a connection between encyclopedic thinking and violent identity thinking in Côte d'Ivoire? (6) finally, an artistic perspective: how can these findings be translated into artistic practice?
The second part of the PhD contains my personal philosophy and poetics as a documentary filmmaker, showing how fiction and reality, the real and the imaginary, the visible and the invisible are two sides of the same Reality. Finally, I conclude with a chapter on the confusiing relationship between ethics and aesthetics within documentary praxis and the role the documentary filmmaker plays in our society.