“What is Life? It is the beginning of Death. What is Death? It is the end of Life. What is existence? It is the continuation of Blood. What is Blood? It is the reason to exist!” --- José Mojica Marins (At Midnight I Will Steal Your Soul)
"Here lives the incantation of matter
A language forever.
Like a flame burning away the darkness
Life is flesh on bone convulsing above the ground."
Death and sex … Annihilation and creation … Dying and living …
Through the speckled chiaroscuro of the mind of Edmund Elias Merhige a cinemutation is born; a nightmarish vision of monochromatic poetry seething, writhing, pulsating with mutilation and madness …
In a decrepit abode, hidden in the wooded ether of a grim heaven, God commits suicide, eviscerating himself, disemboweling life with a straight razor, his dark blood saturating his cloth and his surrounds, pouring from his mouth. He expires. And from beneath his shroud Mother Earth emerges …
God begets Mother Earth and she masturbates the ravaged body of God until he ejaculates over her porcelain torso. She smears the milky jism down through her coarse pubis and deep inside her …
Mother Earth begets mankind; Son of Earth - Flesh On Bone, a twitching, spasmodic aberration of Nature, who awakens on the filthy ground of a Hell on earth …
Mother Earth and Son of Earth traverse this primordial landscape, she masked and serene, he in a perpetual seizure with fleshy pustules protruding from his mouth. A shrouded tribe gather and assist the travelers …
A band of faceless savages ravage and ruin Mother Earth, leaving Flesh on Bone to flounder onward alone until another tribe gather Mother Earth’s remains in a basket …
Son of Earth is set upon and beaten to death, yet nature concludes, Mother Earth being reborn, amidst the same forest where God dwelled …
Begotten (1989) along with David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1976) is probably the most experimental horror film ever given an international release. The film’s auteur E. Elias Merhige, like Lynch, made the film as a labour of dark troubled love, from the bowels of his days and nights at New York’s State University at Purchase, where he formed an experimental theatre group called Theatreofmaterial (the guised performers act in the film).
Merhige, who later directed the intriguing Shadow of the Vampire (2000), about the making of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), was apparently inspired by the “materialactionfilms” of Viennese filmmakers Otto Muhl and Kurt Kren, whose subversive, repellant works often depict utter human degradation and grotesquerie. Explains Merhige, “I used those parts that scared me, or that I just couldn’t understand—the parts that stuck with me for days and that forced me to wonder where within me did this come from?”
Begotten was filmed around various New York City construction sites and parks (when no one else was around), the black and white footage was then subjected to a painstaking post-production process where Merhige used a specially designed optical printer to “damage” and “weather” the light and shadow. Approximately eight to ten hours of optical work - re-photographing, visual treatments, and filtering – was required to produce one minute of film!
Begotten is like Akira Kurasawa meets David Lynch meets Jorg Buttgereit; a languid, horrific, dream-like, intensely surreal study on life and death. It will alienate most people. It is “art” on the slab; the morgue of cinema, ritualistic and bewildering, yet extraordinary in the way it compels you to keep watching, despite its almost unbearably slow unfold. Begotten aims to mark the viewer and it does so with a spade and a shovel, digging deep into the subconscious, playing like a Rorschach test for the mind’s eye.
Metaphysical and lyrical, narrated only in images and punctuated by dank earthly sounds (water, fire, laboured breathing, insects, rattles, etc), and accompanied by a haunting, ethereal score. The sun rises and sets several times over the course of the 78-minute film, casting a stark, eerie glow. This is a film that commands a curious visceral power.
Released in the States in 1991, Begotten only received proper attention at universities and museums. It then had a VHS release in 1995 and a DVD release in 2001, both of which are now out of print, with DVD copies fetching over $US100 on amazon and ebay. I have a VHS dub from the DVD and it only heightens the film’s profoundly unsettling, but mesmerizing avant-garde atmosphere. Indeed, a totally unique and deliberately disturbing film that brutally caresses the dark soul.
For those game enough to venture into the Darkness here is a ten-minute excerpt depicting Mother Earth's creation of Flesh on Bone and subsequent ordeal (warning: strictly not work safe!):
What a horror treat this one was....another quality product for the JD and Bryn marathons....Eraserhead visuals depicting Cannibal Holocaust carnage...wonderfully disturbing, I will never forget some of the imagery.
Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
Comment by Damo
For the Sake of Argument
My Apologetics
the video I mean.
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile