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| Images courtesy of World Artists Home Video |
"Language Bearers, Photographers, Diary makers
You with your memory are dead, frozen
Lost in a present that never stops passing
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."
The first time I saw Begotten (1990), I was a young teenager, around fourteen or fifteen. There was a small video rental store within walking distance of my home, and better yet, they didn't check IDs for R-rated films. The cover art for Begotten caught my eye, enigmatic and mysterious. I waited until late that evening to watch it in my room on my TV/VCR combo so as to not alert my mom of my activities. Begotten proceeded to scare the ever-loving shit out of me that night and haunted my dreams for several nights afterward, prompting me to sleep with my lights on. It was unlike any movie I had watched prior, experimental and nightmarish, burning my mind with a type of imagery I was unaccustomed to. After that, the film became rare and hard to find, and I could not revisit it for many years. How would this fare as an adult who is now intimately familiar with experimental films?
Begotten establishes much of its fear in the first ten minutes as it lingers over a humanoid figure that is mutilating itself, stabbing a razor blade deep into its guts, and pulling out the slimy intestines and viscera. This white-robed figure has a "face' that is frozen into an inhuman scream, trapped in an endless agony, and destroys its own body. After a gruesome death, a woman emerges from the desecrated corpse, sensual and aroused. She brings the creature's penis to an erection and eventually an ejaculation, pushing the semen into her vagina to impregnate herself. Out of death comes life. The film's entire runtime explores the cycle of life and death and the violence and brutalities accompanying these dual states.
The way it’s shot, overexposed black-and-white, almost has a Rorschach effect wherein your mind fills in the details and creates new forms and shapes. Interestingly, that fits into the theme of death and rebirth (though violence) as your own experience creates personal subtext. The story isn't static; it can be molded like a piece of clay to build a statue that represents each viewer's personal interpretation of the depicted events. It feels like one is witnessing an esoteric ritual, perhaps one from a dying populace, a last-ditch effort to stop the world from ending. Although logically contradictory, Begotten looks like a film that predates the invention of cameras, degraded, damaged, and ancient. Director E. Elias Merhige was quoted as saying: "I wanted Begotten to look, not as if it were from the twenties, not even as if it were from the nineteenth century, but as if it were from the time of Christ, as if it were a cinematic Dead Sea Scroll that had been buried in the sands, a remnant of a culture with customs and rites that no longer apply to this culture, yet are somewhere underneath it, under the surface of what we call reality."
Sexuality and abuse factor heavily in the film, beginning with Mother Earth impregnating herself by quite graphically fingering herself and continuing into an extended rape scene later on. Mother Earth represents all women, and her duality as a mother, who is revered, and as a sexual object, where she is abused and murdered by the populace. Perhaps the idea is that this is a vicious cycle that we are doomed to repeat forever, treating women as a priceless vessel when she is carrying a child and as disposable garbage when she isn't.
Although Begotten is over thirty years old, the vibe and aesthetic it utilizes is alive and well. In the past few years, there has been an explosion of a subgenre of horror dubbed "analog horror" that uses older mediums, such as VHS tapes, to impart horror and fear. Another genre called "weirdcore" uses similar lo-fi elements to create surreal landscapes and environments, and relies on low resolution to force the viewer to fill in the blanks and create their own terror in the spaces between. Begotten has inspired many artists in their work including musician Marilyn Manson and director Guy Maddin. While the highly experimental nature of works like these can frustrate audiences who prefer a more solidified narrative, it's intoxicating to people who enjoy digging into arthouse works. Begotten still holds power as a bizarre and mystifying piece of art that haunts viewers to this day.
--Michelle Kisner
For more reading check out Andrew's review!