"Language bearers, Photographers, Diary makers.
You with your memory are dead, frozen.
Lost in a present that never stops passing.
Here lives the incarnation of matter.
A language forever."
Words that represent the contrast between life and death, beginning and end, everything and nothing, trust and resignation.
Fierce and sad words, those that raise the curtain on one of the strangest and most interesting shows of Weird cinema, released in 1991 by director Edmund Elias Merhige, but conceived two years earlier. A show that takes the name of "Begotten".
The emotions experienced are already clear from that much-discussed opening scene. That isolated house in the middle of a dark countryside where a masked man, driven by madness (later identified as "God"), commits suicide with a knife, giving birth, after a prolonged agony, to a beautiful Mother Nature, also masked, who will impregnate herself with the seed of "God", bringing to light a strange boy named "Son of Earth" (the "begotten" of the title), who, between epileptic attacks and an attempt to sustain the mother through a rope used as an umbilical cord, will not have a good future when he meets, from the top of a mountain, a group of strange hooded beings.
At first glance, it's not easy to explain the basic concept of the film. Simply because there is no actual basic concept underlying "Begotten".
Merhige himself said that the film can be framed in multiple meanings, through personal interpretations, possibly linked to subjective experiences (and not by chance from one of these, which really happened to him, the idea for the film in question was born).
And the suicide of God can be explained in various ways; it can be seen as the embodiment of those hopes for a better world that, inside a kind of black hole, succumb to the hypocrisy and falsity of certain people, the end of peace, and the beginning of genuine infernal suffering, existential frustration.
The subsequent birth of the Son of Earth, and its following relationship with the undefinable costume-like indigenous could symbolize the difficult, if not impossible, acceptance of what little remains of nature itself in the world, and perhaps even of life, leading to its subsequent ruthless defacement. Although maybe a glimmer of hope has remained, after all.
A permanent anguish prevails, generated in part by the effective repetition of sounds and bird voices by composer Evan Albam, and on the other by a strange black and white that, by suppressing colors, leads back, in its form, to the first two decades of 20th-century cinema. The result is a slow journey into a hallucinated, hard-to-identify dimension, worth embarking on, especially by those attracted to a certain type of cinema.
Some have seen (or still see) something blasphemous in "Begotten". It is not so. This is a film that makes one think, in every field. Human, ecological, religious (with connections to Christian and Egyptian myths), perhaps even political, and potentially reflective for believers (like myself) on the world's condition. This makes Edmund Elias Merhige's work very relevant, in its entirety. An Expressionist key work, owing much to Munch's "The Scream" in some ways (like Tsukamoto's "Tetsuo," albeit on a different theme) and also to David Lynch's "Eraserhead." Something fluid for some, heavy for others, impossible to endure for yet others. In short, not for everyone.
"Like a flame burning away in the darkness
Life is flesh on bone convulsing above the ground"
It would be better to ensure that one's life is not like this.
Loading comments slowly
Other reviews
By N.I.B.II.O
The black and white footage, along with the lack of audio replaced by strange sounds on loop, does nothing but transport the viewer into a hallucinated and timeless dimension.
Mother Nature approaches the now lifeless body of 'GOD,' and by masturbating the corpse, she will fertilize herself and bring forth a son.