BEGOTTEN

Easily one of the most singular films in the history of experimental cinema, E. Elias Merhige’s BEGOTTEN is a deeply religious, allegorical nightmare carved onto celluloid, distanced from recognizable place or time and uncovering a visceral, primitivist brutality that may be unparalleled in the history of the moving image.

Despite its near-total lack of cultural reference points, the churning, repetitive, symbolic actions of the entities depicted onscreen—all players from Merhige’s radical Theater of Material troupe—suggest a broad mythology drawn from sources as widespread as ancient Egyptian myth, disparate pagan traditions and Christian allegory. There is no dialogue or traditional narrative, yet BEGOTTEN’s hypnotic aesthetic and the ritualistic actions of its characters—named God Killing Himself, Mother Earth and Son of Earth, Flesh on Bone—are never anything but riveting.

And then there are the images. Merhige’s violently degraded black-and-white photography barely seems photographed at all: figures boil out of fields of grain, bodies dissolve into landscapes, and every frame flickers somewhere between an ancient cave painting, a damaged silent film and a transmission from a civilization that disappeared before history began. Watching BEGOTTEN can feel less like seeing a movie than witnessing some forbidden creation myth that has been dug out of the earth and projected for the first time. Beautiful, repulsive, hypnotic and genuinely otherworldly, it remains one of cinema’s great visions of a world being born and dying before your eyes.

“Evokes Alexander Sokurov and Francis Bacon as well as early David Lynch and a great many splatter films. If you’re looking to be freaked out you shouldn’t pass it up.” - Jonathan Rosenbaum

“One of the ten most important films of modern times.” - Susan Sontag