(E. Elias Merhige, USA, 1989, 72 minutes)
In its abstraction, E. Elias Merhige's directorial debut, Begotten, plays like a Gothic goulash of silent film fragments that have been moldering and degrading for decades.
The combination of rephotographed 16mm B&W reversal film, neutral-density filtration, musique concrète, and eerie sound effects conjures up a powerful sense of unease, enhanced by the lack of dialogue or intertitles.
The story involves three characters: God, Mother Earth, and the Son of Earth, all played by members of Merhige's stage company Theatreofmaterial. Through an open door, he begins with a masked, white-garbed God (Brian Salzburg) on a chair in a corner, spattered with deep black blood as he slices away at his midsection with a straight razor. As he slashes, God convulses while what sounds like a clock submerged in water ticks away on the soundtrack (other sounds arranged and composed by Evan Albam include thunder, buzzing flies and crickets, heartbeats, and persistent moans).
Gradually, entrails fall to the floor. Even after God takes a final breath and slumps to the side, the blood continues to flow until Mother Earth (Donna Dempsey), wearing a diaphanous dress with a mask covering her eyes, emerges from underneath the voluminous fabric and glides out of the room.
After spinning around, head tilted toward the sky, she returns to God where she proceeds to impregnate herself. It isn't necrophilia in the usual sense, but she takes what she needs to conceive. Most every image in the film is too nebulous to cause offense.
Merhige then shifts to a rocky hillside on which her naked, fully-grown, mud-encrusted son (Stephen Charles Barry), aka Flesh on Bone, writhes while nomads in threadbare robes watch impassively before carting him away on a makeshift stretcher to inflict more pain before dragging him to the top of the hill. Merhige probably wouldn't appreciate a comparison to The Passion of the Christ, but it definitely crossed my mind, since Mel Gibson's blood-drenched drama practically exults in Jesus's protracted, excruciating ordeal.
After the son is left to die, the mother returns to drag him away by an umbilical cord-like lead, but she doesn't get far before pants-free nomads arrive to torture her. As they drag away her lifeless body, the son can only watch helplessly. Then again, if she had dragged him much further, she might have strangled him. There's beauty in this film, but there's no love or tenderness. It simply doesn't exist in the pitiless world Merhige has created.
By the end, the bodies have been returned to the Earth. Considering that I watched this film back-to-back with The Life We Leave, it occurred to me that Merhige was ahead of the curve when it comes to terramation. He even ends with buds emerging from the soil as the nomads go about their business without a thought for the mulched-up victims of their violence.
Begotten is a singular experience, though it reminds me of things I would rather not think about, like Marilyn Manson. Merhige, a one-time collaborator, helped to shape Manson's image through videos and tour production. Then again, Trent Reznor was drawing from similar influences, like death-obsessed photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, and look at the two guys now: Reznor has gone from strength to strength, particularly in his film-scoring partnership with Atticus Ross, while Manson is now better known for the horrific abuse he inflicted on several women, including actress Evan Rachel Wood.
Merhige, I'm sure, couldn't have known what was to come, and the two last worked together 30 years ago, but I did my due diligence and watched the videos for "Antichrist Superstar" and "Cryptorchid." In the first, Manson plays a dirtbag fascist ranting from a stage in front of an adoring crowd. There's no trace of Merhige's personality, but the latter is a different story, since it plays like Begotten in miniature, not least because it includes footage from the feature. Even the crackling sound design is similar.
The director followed up with two studio pictures, 2000's Oscar-nominated horror satire Shadow of the Vampire and 2004's psychological thriller Suspect Zero, before making two short Begotten sequels, 2006's "Din of Celestial Birds" and 2022's "Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera," and a final video for Interpol's "The Heinrich Maneuver." Since then, he's worked mostly in theater, though he supervised the 4K restoration of his first feature and has been working on a Leonardo DiCaprio-produced survival drama.
Though I hadn't yet seen Begotten in 2000, Merhige's reputation preceded him, and I made certain to catch his followup when I attended the Toronto International Film Festival that year, especially because he was in attendance with Willem Dafoe, who plays actor Max Schreck, John Malkovich, who plays Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau, and Catherine McCormack, who plays actress Greta Schröder. I found the film, which has all the humor Begotten lacks, pretty delightful.
Merhige's first and last film for Lionsgate presents a highly fictionalized behind-the-scenes look at the making of Murnau's 1922 masterpiece with Malkovich as a win-at-all-costs director and Dafoe in go-for-broke mode as a real-life, bloodsucking Count Orlock. No doubt Merhige had great fun recreating B&W sequences from the original film. If Begotten wasn't to my taste, Vampire definitely was, and I wish he had made more films like it.
To his credit, though, Begotten has garnered plenty of admirers. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, who found the whole thing fairly ridiculous, was not one of them, but the great cultural critic Susan Sontag was fully on board. At the very least, it's part of an experimental, late-20th-century lineage that includes such notable works as Bill Morrison's Decasia, Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God, and Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle.
Love or loathe it, Begotten is the kind of film every cinephile should see at least once. And for the Goth or Goth-adjacent: it should be required viewing.
Begotten opens at New York's Film Forum on Oct 2; sneak preview on Oct 1 with the director in attendance. It opens in Seattle at Northwest Film Forum on Oct 23. Begotten images (featuring Donna Dempsey and Stephen Charles Barry) from Kino Lorber and Shadow of the Vampire image (Willem Dafoe and Catherine McCormack) from Lionsgate by way of Anti-Film School.
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