Hippolyte Leon Rivail was the sort of teacher everyone wants but many of us never have. He’s an inspiring figure in 1850s Paris, keeping his middle-school-age students at the edge of their seats. Rivail is almost a magician, disappearing and reappearing while circling the classroom. “It’s not what our eyes can see—it’s what we can’t see,” he insists, adding that “yearning for knowledge will take us to wonderful places.”
The opening scene from Kardec sets the parameters for Rivali’s journey. The 2019 film by Brazilian director Wagner de Assis was seldom if ever seen in U.S. theaters but is now available on Netflix. It tells the “based on a true story” of the founder of a religion, Spiritism, that favors communicating with the dead through spirit mediums; unlike most varieties of “spiritualism,” Spiritism believes in reincarnation. To many North American viewers, the topic will seem like a curious footnote in the history of doubtful ideas. However, Spiritism persists and maintains a foothold in Brazil where its organizations operate hospitals and charities. A title at the end of Kardec tells us that Rivail’s The Spirits Book, written under the name Allan Kardec, sold 30 million copies in that country.
The outlines of Kardec conform to the facts of the case. Rivail came to prominence in France as an education reformer. He was especially keen to remove the country’s schools from the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Church (represented in the film by a boo-hiss priest who materializes at regular intervals). A champion of Reason, Rivail was dismissive of seances when they became a fad across much of the world. As he told his colleagues in the academy of science, “Let’s put an end to this farce!”
However, in one of the interesting counter-notes that uplift the film, he also wonders whether the fascination was born of “the despair of this darkened world.” Rivail and his wife operate their own food bank for the homeless, who were numerous. He cared about the material world but came to suspect the existence of another dimension, parallel and ever present.
Rivail’s shift in perspective isn’t explained convincingly but suffice to say, he believed in investigating the phenomenon by scientific means and determined that the torrent of words pouring from mediums, many of them preserved on hastily-written pages (inspiring the Surrealists’ “automatic writing”), revealed similar information from widely separated individuals. The mediums were, he decided, communicating the same message, which to him meant their words emanated from the same source.
Spiritism is best understood as part of a wider movement that emerged in the 19th century. Science had arrived at a materialistic view of the universe as dead matter populated by life—a complex of self-modifying automatons without a driver, engineer or reason for existing. Western Christianity seemed repudiated in the light of those new ideas, which drew their power from empirical data, yet offered the missing glimmer of hope for meaning that science couldn’t provide. Seekers and charlatans alike mapped out a middle zone of spiritual doctrines claiming foundation in science, not faith. Before Rivail “discovered” Spiritism, his wife mentioned that science and poetry should be reconciled.
As Kardec shows, Rivail was expelled from the science academy and denounced as a heretic by the Roman Catholic Church. He faced disputes within his movement as well as moments of doubt. Moving along at a lulling pace against a photoshopped Second Empire Paris, Kardec’s interior scenes are shot in filtered sunlight that suggests the twilight world Rivail dove into with increasing zeal.
