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…

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"…

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…

"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…

Ok, so I understand the poetic power of this film and what it's trying to say, but ultimately this film comes off as pretentious, meandering and exploitative. I'd probably view it differently of it was actually from the earliest days of arthouse cinema (as it appears to be, intentionally emulated for extra wankery) but the fact that it's from 1989 makes it almost inexcusably innacessible. Being 'disturbing' does not in and of itself make good cinema.

At points there is a certain meditative beauty to this film but rather than the life changing nihilistic awakening it sets out to be, the majority of the film jumps between cheap torture porn and torturously mundane that just left me feeling a bit…