Begotten

Against all my better judgement I sat captivated by this film. My watch, the sky outside, the hunger pangs in my belly becoming distant and thin. Is it a movie? I still don't know, it's more like opening up a window onto a world that exists elsewhere and just watching things happen. The stark grainy black and white is so grotesquely beautiful, it feels alien. This isn't "arthouse" filmmaking as we've come to understand the term. This is art. Living and breathing, entirely regardless of my interpretation, of my wants, or my needs in a film. If that sounds like something you want to see, by all means.

I usually love bizarre, experimental, non-linear films. Not this time. This is a boring one, filled with very dull, repetitive images. Nothing goes on for on and on and on, and many times, due to the lighting effects, the editing, the grainy out-of-focus picture, and the blending of white with light and black with dark, you wonder if there is any image at all on the screen or if you are getting a bad reception. Oh yeah, and there are constant shots of the sun going up, and down, and up, and down... When the movie ended, my reaction was not of horror, or repulsion, or awe, but of amazement, as I wondered "THAT was IT?".

The reason why people think that this crap being passed great art is the work of a genius is the presentation of the credits. The guy that looked like Leatherface who was repeatedly cutting what is supposed to be an intestine is credited as God, and other characters as Mother Nature and etc. Why, how easy to create art! Now we can credit Elizabeth Berkeley's character in "Showgirls" as "God stripping several times and constantly acting stupidly in Las Vegas with Elvis look-alikes and screwing Kyle MacLaughlan" and officially declare it a work of art!...

The first 3 or 4 minutes of Begotten were very promising; the graininess of the film, the obscurity of the scene in front of me, the silence, all made me feel like I was peering in on something forbidden, mysterious. I'd been told nothing of the film before I saw it except that it was "disturbing," and I thought initially that was just what I was going to get.

But after a while (and it wasn't a very long while, either) I just stopped caring. It stopped being worth the effort to struggle to discern the action going on in front of me, to piece the story of even the point of the non-story together, and sitting back and letting the imagery unfold in front of me, sort of accepting it passively for its own beauty didn't seem to work, either.

Some of the shots are beautiful, I'll admit it. And some of them are, for lack of a better word, disturbing. But I spent more of my time wondering "was this shot on film or on video, or both?" or "is that a continuous recording of crickets chirping, or is it a loop?" than "who are they, and why are they doing this?"

Because honestly I didn't care who they were, or why anything that happened on screen happened. I didn't feel any great need to. Half the time I was watching something purely abstract and non-representational, and the other half, what felt like old stock footage that someone had pieced together because they thought it looked neat, even though they had no context for what it was being shown. And it dragged on and on and on, going nowhere except where it had already been, so joy of joys, you get to see a variation on a scene that's already been beaten into the ground a couple times already, and then you get to see it again.

Mercifully, the film did eventually end, with what felt like it was supposed to be a "see, there's the point of all this" series of images, but in order to reveal the point, there needs to be a question posed in the first place, and that wasn't there. Everything just happened sort of matter-of-factly, without any emotional investment to it whatsoever, hoping it would get by on its grossness. Which it didn't. The grossness was deflated by how impossible it was to see what was going on anyway. It wasn't like peering through murk to find something you weren't sure you wanted to see. It was staring straight at the murk itself while it deluded itself that it wasn't something you couldn't bear to see.

This is not a casual movie-going experience; its unnerving, dark, and filled with upsetting imagery. This film has a sort of evil, misanthropic feel to it that's difficult to explain succinctly. For more daring viewers, though, E. Elias Merhige's "Begotten" offers a unique and somewhat terrifying experience that is not easily forgotten. The storyline, if you can call it that, plays out in three loose acts, each personified by the brutalization and unfortunate death of the "character," who are themselves representative of an axiom and/or figurehead in any number of Judo Christean and Pagan religions. Ostensibly, the three defining characters are credited as "God Killing Himself," "Son of Earth," and "Mother Earth," with the remaining, nameless characters credited as "Theatre of Material," which apparently was Merhige's production company. The overall look of the film harks strongly of early silent films, with loose blobs of shadow predominating and copious simulated scratches and aging present in nearly every frame. Its very cool to witness the obvious hard work that went into creating such a look. The imagery itself, though, is quite brutal and strong enough to ward off nearly all of the mainstream. If you like Black Metal, Black Ambient/Industrial, or other dark and uncompromising art, though, you should really dig this movie. Its a terrific, memorable nightmare and arguably a strange sort of milestone. in the realm of avante-gard film. Watch this one with ALL the lights out... ---|--- Reviews by Flak Magnet

I saw 'Begotten' last night, and I'm of two minds on the film.

On one hand, I appreciate it for being the total invert of a Michael Bay film. No dialogue, extremely stylized grainy B&W photography, some of the most genuinely horrific imagery ever set to film, and a very compelling use of sound (which nobody else seems to have really picked up on yet). It's a reflection on a theme, and it dares go where most filmmakers do not not only in terms of images, but of production and concept. It's a movie that most people don't understand, and if you read through these comments you'll find a lot of people whose lack of ability to figure this film out results in them shrieking about 'pretentiousness' with the fervor of a gibbon rattling the bars of its cage at feeding time. It genuinely shocked and disturbed me, and the last time a film managed to do that was a while ago.

On the other, this is a thirty-minute short that sprawls out to over an hour and a half. I understand that there might be artistic merit in using repetition and monolithic pacing as a bludgeon, but in this case it just doesn't help everything hang together. Imagine being approached by a ragged man on the street who grabys you by the shoulders and says something that completely confounds the core of your being... but then, instead of leaving your shattered and gibbering in his wake, he just keeps talking and talking and talking. By the end of the movie, I found myself glancing at my watch now and again.

This is not entertainment, people. This is disentertainment. This is how you deprogram people who just watched "Glitter." If you watch movies to be entertained, this will frustrate, confound, and possibly anger you. You don't approach 'Begotten' like a chocolate cake you want to eat because it tastes good. You approach it like something on the menu you have never heard of before, something you see furtive glances of through the kitchen door, something that's dark and glistens and twitches on its platter; something you order not because it will taste good, but because you just have to know what it's like.