Vater: „Was guckst du dir da grad an?“

Ich: „Begotten.“

Vater: „Und worum geht’s da?“

Ich: „Puh, das ist schwierig zu erklären, deshalb werde ich ihn auch bloß bei Letterboxd loggen, aber nicht bewerten.“

Vater: „Wieso?“

Ich: „Weil ich glaube, dass die ganzen Sequenzen mit einem Gott, der sich selbst ausweidet und dann als Frau wiedergeboren wird, die sich mit dem Samen des toten Gottes selbst schwängert, um anschließend ein Kind zu gebären, das so groß wie ein Erwachsener ist und diesem Kind dann eine Schlinge um den Hals legt und es daran durch die Welt schleift, bevor sie von einer Gruppe gesichtsloser Wesen vergewaltigt und getötet werden und dann wiedergeboren werden, eher um metaphorische Annäherungen an existenzielle Fragen nach…

Went digging through old notebooks this morning and found the notes from my first viewing of "Begotten." If I remember correctly, we watched Jay Rosenblatt's "King of the Jews" that night as well. I wrote this very late at night directly after watching it. I typed up exactly what I scribbled that night so forgive the roughness of the ideas:

"A film that brings the Cosmos and creation into bodily form. So often creation myths feel so abstracted, epic, cleaned-up or romanticized; to see it enacted in this film through bodies in such stark and often brutal ways is devastating. It is disturbing, but not exploitative the way it had been described to me. This is not a "gross-out film"…

When I call this haunting, I mean that there are images here that hang in the imagination, that cause disgust, fear, and intrigue simultaneously, that resurface like suppressed memories scarred by television static. This has (whether Merhige ever saw him or not) echoes of Patrick Bokanowski's silhouettes and grotesques, and also it evokes the chthonic costuming of Zulawski's aliens in On the Silver Globe, hooded Stygians that are just inhuman enough to unnerve. I suspect it's also heavily influenced by Jodorowsky and Lynch, who both seem the likelier influences than the aforementioned simply by likelihood of exposure.

However, what seems most Bokanowskian about this is that it eschews traditional narrative devices all together (unlike Lynch, whose most notable works at…

In order to rewrite myth a film must also rewrite language. Begotten is the result of this abdication, a work that goes beyond the trappings of conventional cinema and beyond the arthouse auteurs and instead opting to tap into the very foundations of what it means to make mythology.

And so we arrive at the beginning. The original creator giving birth to creation, new life forming from the death of the old. As such we must find total abandonment of medium, stripping everything down to just the barest of bones: black and white (no color, no grey), silent mouths (for this precedes language), and pure activity (as actions become allegory). There is no such thing as a traditional narrative when…

"In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him."
- 1 John 4:9

A seventy minute spiritual/anti-spiritual attack on the senses deserving of nearly perfect marks, if only for its aesthetic brilliance.

But no, this film is so much more than just a visual marvel; it works, quite well actually, as a brilliant metaphor for the horrors resting deep within human nature that date all the way back to the genesis of mankind.

A reflection of the corrupt path that we have traveled down in the eyes of E. Elias Merhige - who, with Begotten, established himself as a true cinematic genius…

Is Begotten pretentious? That's a good question...

Is it alienating? Yes, incredibly alienating. Is it inflated? It's overinflated. That to me is the film's main flaw and it is a big one. It feels like a short film except it is not at all short.

Back in my early 20's, when I loved taking hallucinogens and drinking cough medicine at 3AM, to come a cross something like Begotten was like finding a buried treasure. I still enjoy finding visually-driven shorts and avante-garde films to splice with my own music. It's fun and is the closest to making your own music video without the irritation of literally directing a music video.

The concept is an abstract story with no dialogue that…

can i be completely honest with you? like super honestly? like putting it all out there? like brutally? i really didn’t like it. it wasn’t scary or particularly scarring at all in my opinion. i feel like just because it has no sound other than the demogorgon-esque sounds that appear to be coming from the twitchy fella and the water sloshing noises that are heard throughout the film and it’s  in black and white, people automatically want to label it as a terrifying and deep film. i know it’s probably not supposed to be obvious, but like how the hell are we supposed to know which one is god and who the hell is humanity and what the fuck is…

A starkly filmed, grain-drenched nightmare vision of the creation myth. E. Elias Merhige’s black-and-white avant-garde exercise in willful endurance opens with the death of God, seating in a chair in a woodland shack, torturing himself through self-disembowelment. Resembling the elliptical horror of a Francis Bacon painting, Merhige presents a series of long, often statically filmed, often gory and always transgressive vignettes. Taken on its own terms, the film is an unqualified success, even though you may never want to watch it again. This is a punishing work for viewers looking for something even more antagonistically surreal than Eraserhead or Jodorowsky. The muddy shock imagery plays as a grotesque Rorschach test. I’m never sure if I enjoy this movie, but I…