A young argentine director reflects upon the metaphysical ideas of british natural

historian Philip Henry Gosse as he experiments with images and sounds stored in his

personal database.

Director's Statement

Did Adam have a navel? If he had never been in any woman's womb, he had never

been attached to any umbilical cord. The 19th century naturalist Philip Henry Gosse

had the misfortune to be obsessed with this kind of question: he wrote a book called

OMPHALOS (navel in ancient Greek) aimed at answering it. While his contemporaries

puzzled over the workings of evolution and sedimentation, he worried about how to

fit all the things science had learned in the 19th century into a biblical chronology

of only several thousand years. How could it be that fossils found across the entire

surface of our planet suggested a deep time span of billions of years when the Bible

spoke of only six thousand? The mountains of fossil-laden sedimentary rocks proved

solidly that humans were newcomers on a very ancient planet. How to resolve this

troubling evidence with a literal belief in BIBLE scripture? And their answer was: Adam

had a navel and the fossils and sediments of our planet are of the same nature as this

one: they are like traces of a Time that never happened, geological marks of a faked

past, skeletons of animals that never existed. The scientists thought his argument was

absurd, and his fellow Christians did not like the idea that God had tricked mankind

into some kind of dark game. His work was rejected and forgotten. This is a tribute to

his figure, his illustrations of nature and his brilliant metaphysical theory