Begotten - A Rorschach test for the eye: God eviscerating himself, an Eve figure emerges from his entrails and inseminates herself with his corpse

E. Elias Merhige, Begotten (1989)

«A profoundly repellant yet strangely lyrical and poetic cinemutation, BEGOTTEN is a wordless black and white reverie in which God kills himself and begets Mother Earth, who in turn begets Mankind, who in turn endures all manner of abuse. Yes, that’s the premise (more or less) of this amazing creation, as unique and unprecedented, in its way, as David Lynch’s seminal Eraserhead.»

«Begotten is a 1991 Experimental/horror film, directed and written by E. Elias Merhige.
The film heavily deals with religion and the biblical story of the Creation. But as Merhige revealed during Q&A sessions, its primary inspiration was a near death experience he had when he was 19, after a car crash. The film features no dialogue, but rather uses harsh and uncompromising images of human pain and suffering to tell its tale.
The film was shot on black and white reversal film, and then every frame was rephotographed for the look that is seen. The only colors are black and white. There are no half-tones. This is intended to add to the eerie atmosphere of the movie, as sometimes the viewer cannot always exactly make out what it is being shown, but can still infer a sense of suffering. The look of the film has been described as “a Rorschach test for the eye”. Merhige said that for each minute of original film, it took up to 10 hours to rephotograph it for the look desired.»

«Made in 1989 but apparently first released in 1991, this remarkable if extremely upsetting and gory black-and-white experimental feature by E. Elias Merhige doesn't have any dialogue and lacks a plot or even a series of actions one can easily follow. But what you can make out is so horrific you may not want to know more. Working with filters and rephotographing his original footage in various ways, Merhige reportedly devoted ten hours of work to processing each minute of this 78-minute film, and the sheer otherworldliness of the grainy, “overexposed” images is hard to forget. Evoking Alexander Sokurov and Francis Bacon as well as early David Lynch and a great many splatter films, the medieval, allegorical plot begins with a figure identified as God in the credits eviscerating himself; an Eve figure emerges from his entrails and inseminates herself with his corpse, and she and the resultant child wind up on a pilgrimage leading to further gore, pain, and devastation when they encounter a nomadic tribe. If you're squeamish you should avoid this like the plague; others may find it hard to shake off the artistry and originality of this visionary effort. And if you're looking to be freaked out you shouldn't pass it up.» - Jonathan Rosenbaum

“Nobody will get through BEGOTTEN without being marked… each image is a seductive mystery, a Rorschach test for the adventurous eye.”–Richard Corliss

“…considerably less intoxicating in effect than it is in theory… seems almost entirely self-contained, with little effort to engage an audience on even the level of myth; the film’s approach is far too grotesque for that. The experience of watching Begotten can best be characterized as intense. “ – Janet Maslin

«BACKGROUND:
* Each frame of film was painstakingly manipulated to create the distressed chiaroscuro universe of the movie. According to the technical production notes, after the raw footage was shot, “…optimum exposure and filtration were determined, the footage was then re-photographed one frame at a time… it took over ten hours to re-photograph less than one minute of selected takes.”
* It has been reported that the film was inspired by a near death experience the Merhige had after an automobile accident.
* Critics from Time, Film Comment, The Hollywood Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and New York Newsday each named Begotten one of the ten best films of 1991. Novelist and photographer Susan Sontag called it one of the ten best films of modern times.
* After Begotten, Merhige went on to direct the music video “Cryptorchid” for Marilyn Manson (which reused footage from Begotten) before landing a major feature, Shadow of the Vampire (2000)–a horror film about the making of Nosferatu, starring Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck and John Malkovich as Murnau.
* Begotten is intended as part of a trilogy of films. A second film, Din of Celestial Birds, which deals with the idea of evolution rather than creation, has been released in a 14 minute version that is intended as a prologue to the second installment.
* After its brief run in specialty arts theaters, including stints at the Museum of Modern Art and Smithsonian, Begotten received a very limited video release, first on VHS and then on DVD. Merhige explains that this is because he does not believe that these formats are truly capable of reproducing the look he intended for the film:
There are so many arcane, deeply intentional uses of grain, light and dark in that film that it is closer to Rosicrucian manuscript on the origin of matter than it is to being a “movie”…. When I finished the film I never allowed it to be screened on video because of how delicately layered and important the image is in conveying the deeper mystery of what the film is “about”… this is why it is no longer available on DVD until I find a digital format that is capable of capturing the soul and intent of the film. My experiments in BluRay have been promising.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The painfully graphic image of “God disemboweling Himself” with a straight razor–shot in the grainy, high-contrast black and white–is not easily forgotten.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A minimalist, mythic narrative of grotesque, ritualized suffering enshrouded in astonishing abstract avant-garde visuals and a hypnotic ambient soundtrack. Love it, hate it, or admire the technique while criticizing the intent–everyone admits there is nothing else quite like it in our cinematic universe.
Original trailer for Begotten
COMMENTS: Begotten is a difficult film to rate. It does not set out to entertain, and it does not entertain. There is no dialogue, and no real story in any traditional sense; the loose tale of cosmic death and rebirth is a dim impression of a plot. There are characters, of a sort, but without reading the end credits or hearing a synopsis, one would be hard pressed to identify them as gods of creation. The images are relentless, simultaneously beautiful and very, very disturbing: the film lingers lovingly over abstract but graphic scenes of symbolic gang rape, torture and atrocity. Begotten is an experiment in film, and the act of watching it needs to be approached as an experiment in viewing.
Many viewers dismiss Begotten as pretentious, sadistic trash, and it’s easy to understand their position. On the purely textual level–what “happens” in the movie–the film could be seen as an existential snuff film. Both male and female genitalia are put on graphic display, although they are hardly shot to erotic effect, as they are often difficult to recognize through the grain and haze of the film. More importantly, hardly a minute passes without depicting some form of excruciating pain, from God’s self-disembowelment to the ceremonial rape of Mother Earth to the seeming endless tortures the ever-quivering “Flesh-on-Bone” endures at the hands of the cowled figures. (Admittedly, it’s hard to say with metaphysical certainty that these godlike figures actually “suffer” without projecting our own human feelings onto them. Flesh-on-Bone, in particular, seems to be in the grips of a perpetual epileptic fit from birth, so the convulsive jerking of his limbs as he’s dragged about a forest by a length of rope tied around his neck may or may not be a pain reaction).
These scenes would be banal and pornographic if they had been filmed by a static camera, without any sort of artistic transformation. But what gives Begotten its staying power is its unique visual look. Every frame in the film was transformed in post-production: the black and white contrasts were turned up to 11, and flickering, pulsing light effects were added. These efforts turned the finished, reconstituted images into something abstract and mysterious. The effect can be like looking at a world that’s been wrapped in wet newspaper, or watching a series of faded, archival crime scene pictures stitched together to make a film. The visual transformations are utterly unique. And, the grotesque images of suffering are alternated with images of aching natural beauty: moonrises, a black bird flapping across the sky, sunlight streaming through the rushes. At times, the picture becomes so scrambled that it can be difficult to make out what’s “actually” appearing on the screen, which adds to the movie’s dreamlike effect. Even the film’s harshest critics would be hard pressed to deny that, at least on the technical level, the film brings something original, impressive, and praiseworthy into existence.
Begotten is not a photographic experiment, but a motion picture, and the weird effect doesn’t result from a series of static images alone, but also from the way the pictures interact with each other on the screen. The images flicker and pulse, shadows grow in the background. The Begotten universe is in ceaseless motion, a constant, unfinished state of becoming; it’s most definitely Somewhere Else. The “flicker effect” was deliberately intended by Merhige to try to induce an altered state of consciousness in the viewer; to resonate with the slower brainwave rhythms in an attempt to bypass the conscious mind and speak to the deeper, pre-lingual and pre-rational parts of the brain. The soundtrack is an indispensable aid in achieving the desired trancelike effect. It consists of a very small palette of repetitive sounds–the chirp of a cricket, a heartbeat, gurgling, the crackle of a campfire–which are looped throughout the soundtrack in various overlapping rhythms. Merhige has called the Begotten endeavor an attempt to found a “genre of the Unconscious.”
Begotten does have a sort of hypnotic effect on the viewer, as long as the viewer is willing to participate and play along with it. As with all forms of hypnosis, it only works with a willing, receptive subject. Watching the film for a second time while composing this review, I found my mind wandering into meditative reveries that were only lightly inspired by the visions witnessed by my eyes, occasionally drawn back into the movie by some broad shift of scene or action on my television screen. Because we are watching archetypal figures engaging in obscure rituals in a visually alien landscape, with no plot to guide us, our minds have to find something to do to fill in the gaps in the experience.

Of course, the wandering mind effect results as much from the minimal narrative as it does from the hypnotic audiovisual technique. Probably the most common, and most sympathetic, complaint from viewers who are willing to give Begotten a chance is that the film is intoxicating at first, but becomes boring after fifteen or twenty minutes have passed. It can be quite a chore to stay in Begotten’s unconscious world for as long as Merhige asks us to. That may be a fault of the impatient viewer who is unable to shut off his rational mind and let the film flow through him, but interest followed by boredom is such a predictable reaction to Begotten that it would be irresponsible not to mention it. Perhaps our short attention spans are to blame, or perhaps waking human brain hasn’t evolved to remain awake in such an extreme oneiric state for an hour at a stretch. Perhaps the experience is quite different and more effective when the film is projected in a theater. (I think the optimal way to view the film may be lying prone, on a dose of mild painkillers, while recuperating from minor surgery). At any rate, many people suggest, myself among them, that Begotten would have had far more impact at about a quarter or a third of the current length, and perhaps even ranked as an undisputed classic rather than an intriguing, partly successful experiment.
Of course, as with any truly weird film, many will dismiss it as worthless and pretentious merely because it’s irrational. Others will assume that, because the film made an impression on them, the irrationality must be a code for some deep, esoteric meaning. The inspiration for the action of Begotten is a private creation myth that taps into universal religious archetypes. The goddess impregnating herself with the seed of a dead god brings to mind Isis conceiving Horus through a similar coupling with the dead god Osiris; and it may be difficult not to associate the sufferings of Son of Earth (Flesh-on-Bone) with the sufferings of the Christian Son of God. Merhige has at least partially encouraged the Gnostics in his fan base with the copious chapter titles on the DVD release (over fifty of them), which almost read like a concordance to a religious text. These chapter titles, each associated with a 30 to 90 second segment of the film, make Biblical references to “the Alpha and the Omega” and to primeval locations such as Eden and the Land of Nod, and bear titles such as “Do not Weep. I shall draw all Things Which perish into myself When I am lifted from the Earth.” This suggests that some sort of mystical interpretation can be gleaned from a close study of the “text” of the film–which I doubt is the case.
I believe, rather, that the “meaning” of the film is contained in the moving image itself; the experience of the film is itself what it is “about.” To reduce the film from image to language would be a mistake. The film begins with an incantation rebuking the “language makers” that “you, with your memory, are dead, frozen” and invokes a different sort of language, “the incantation of matter.” If the author could have expressed his intended meaning in a poem or a paragraph, he would have written a poem or a paragraph, rather than going to the difficulty of making a film. The rather simple and elegant idea the film explores is that creation (of matter, and also of art) involves a mix of suffering and beauty, death and re-birth. This inspiration is more a portal of entry into a new, ineffable universe, however, than it is an end result. Some of Merhige’s implications, such as his suggestion that the film is somehow self-aware, elude me. But what it is clear that the film is not reducible to the events which take place onscreen; it speaks to the unconscious, and it’s perfectly acceptable for the message to vary from person to person. As Merhige himself put it in his 2008 article for movieScope:
…I ask you to look at my first film Begotten, not as a narrative made up of characters, but as a drama of forces there to awaken an essential part of our being. It is the very stuff of our origin where language fails, and for lack of a better word, the unconscious begins.
Whether, how deeply, and for how long you will drawn into Begotten’s unique universe is unknowable. All I can say is that, even if you do not have a pleasant time there, the trip is worth taking; and a journey to Begotten’s realms is a mandatory pilgrimage for fans of truly weird cinema.» - 366weirdmovies.com

«The opening scene of E. Elias Merhige's Begotten plays like a home video of the Enuma Elish. A deity sits on a throne, stabbing himself in the belly with a knife. The blood flow, while gruesome, isn't particularly liberal, and it takes a long time for him to die. From the mess emerges a fully grown woman, who (in a scene as as literal as anything from the Elish) proceeds to (yes) masturbate the corpse and (that's right) manually insert the semen into her vagina (most the action is obscured by the grainy, high-constrast black and white photography). Later, we see the woman obviously pregnant, standing by a coffin. Still later we see her offspring, a grown man convulsing violently on the ground.
A user's comment at the Internet Movie Database asks whether "Begotten" is "profound cinematic brilliance or pretentious arthouse trash." When it comes to experimental cinema, even cinephiles allow for little middle ground between the extremes of genius and junk. They want to be stimulated right out of their seats, or the film isn't worth their while. Such a lack of patience would never withstand a viewing of "Begotten," because the film is anything but perfect, and anything but bad.
There are rare moments when, for an instant, I think I can fathom why Susan Sontag called "Begotten" "one of the ten most important films of modern times"...and then I wake up and realize her assessment is insane (I have never seen the rest of her list, nor, to my knowledge, has anyone else). She praises it too much; others trash it too much. In their eagerness to decide whether "Begotten" is great or garbage, few viewers will recognize that it's a good avant-garde film, and that it's as possible for a good (not great) avant-garde film to exist as for a good (not great) conventional film to exist. I don't know why we expect only greatness from this genre. The few reviews I've read of "Begotten" all agree that on one thing: "this movie isn't 'Eraserhead.'" Fine. But what is it?
If we are to believe the credits, the deity is "God killing Himself," the woman is "Mother Earth," and the offspring is "Son of Earth." I prefer to ignore the credits and examine the images. If the suicide is God, he is not the Biblical God in any conventional way we understand Him. His like is found in the pagan Creation texts of the Middle East, or the writings of the Gnostics. If the woman is Mother Earth, she exists apart from our conventional understanding of Nature, a force that remains both intact and powerful even as she is ravished. "Son of Earth" is a strange hybrid of his father and mother - he exists in the world with his mother, yet seems to be little more than a manifestation of his father's own self-destruction. At the same time, he doesn't exactly harm himself. He is, instead, harmed by others.
These are the conclusions I reach based solely on my plain reading of the film. Many claim "Begotten" to be a parable of Biblical Creation, but I see only destruction and reproduction. The notion of creation in destruction is uniquely pagan, nowhere to be found in the Hebrew Scriptures. If God, as the Hebrews understood Him, is anywhere in this film, it is in the thunder, the lightning, and the angry aerial forces that loom so far above the earth. When the Son of Earth is beaten and killed by the Earth's inhabitants, these forces react with fury typical of the Hebrew Deity.
What makes "Begotten" so interesting for the Christian viewer is its separation from the Biblical text, which is achieved without expending Christian connotation. What is revealed instead is the pagan footing on which Christianity stands - not to say Christianity endorses paganism, or completely refutes it. Christ is "Lord of the All" just as he is "King of the Jews."
To many this may sound blasphemous. I prefer to think of it in terms of Christ's universality. Many of the images in "Begotten" are ubiquitous throughout the world's religions, including Christianity but exempting ancient Judaism. Just as Luke's Gospel traces Christ's lineage back to Adam, and implicitly teaches that the New Covenant extends to all humankind, so "Begotten" brings Christ forth, not from a Biblical worldview, but from a pagan worldview. This is the story of Christ much as the early Greek and pagan Christians would have seen it. If the film gives us a sense of both strangeness and familiarity, it is because Christianity did the same to its earliest adherents. "Begotten," more than anything, reiterates both the Otherness and Sameness of the Christian faith.
Christ belongs to all mankind, though many claim him as their own. The earliest Jewish Christians attempted to claim him for Judaism. The Romans wanted him, and were so disheartened when he proved willing to walk among the Barbarians that St. Augustine had to write an entire book explaining why Christianity wasn't a complete hoax. The Europeans wanted him, and willingly spread his words throughout the nations, but only within the contexts that they themselves understood. Those contexts have continually shifted, the message and its meaning continually reinterpreted - the only thing that remains constant is the insistence of mainstream Christendom that Christ belongs to them.
"Begotten" presents us with the story of Christ's death and resurrection, freed from context. The vantage point is pagan, yes - but no real context is provided. There is no doctrinal shading, no scripture references, no philosophic slant. There is nothing but image, pure and brutal.
The film's brutality is intense. There is the first scene, already described. After the Son of Earth is introduced, he is discovered by a group of...humans, insofar as I can tell. They proceed to beat him viciously. When his mother attempts to intervene, she is raped. The beating sequence is long, painful, and repetitive. Many find the repetition to lessen the sequence's impact - I do not.
Films about Christ are praised when they provide a realistically violent portrayal of the crucifixion (Mel Gibson's upcoming "Passion," unseen by me, has received such praise). No one would praise "Begotten" for its violence, perhaps because it is much harder to watch. Yet I find its impact to be greater than any other filmic crucifixion. We have a real sense of the Son of Earth's frailty, his innocence, and his vulnerability - all attributes Christ possessed, rarely shown in representations. The images in "Begotten" hearken to the violent images Isaiah gives us, in those passages describing the Son of Man.
And what of that bizarre opening scene, when the woman impregnates herself with the seed of a dead deity? This is one of the pagan images quietly appropriated into Christianity. We have, after all, the notion of a Virgin Birth, and therefore a spiritual conception - think of the strange, nonphysical intercourse that must occur to bring the Son of Man to Earth. These are ideas we contemplate safely in vague symbols and abstractions. "Begotten" gives us images, whether we want them or not.» - Seth Studer

«Where does one begin when discussing a film like Begotten? The words truly remarkable filmmaking certainly come to mind. Guaranteed to be unlike any other cinematic experience you have ever had, Begotten is in a rare class all its own. Mesmerizing, captivating, upsetting, disturbing, grotesque, disorienting, confusing these are all words that can be used to describe the experience of viewing Begotten. Most importantly and finally, the film can be summed up in just two very important words, amazingly entertaining.
The debut feature from director Elias Merhige is mostly a hodge podge of biblical fact, fiction and interpretation. A godlike creature is shown viscously gutting and stabbing itself within the opening frames of the film. What appears to be this creature's spawn is then attacked and buried by some druid like creatures. What follows are bizarre scenes of torture, sorrow and suffering, all of which lead to the rebirth of the earth and nature, as we know it. It's at this point that we've only truly just begun to scratch the surface and describe the visual awkwardness that is Begotten.
Merhige is known most recently for his film Shadow of the Vampire (AKA the film with the longest and most boring opening title sequence of all time) and his video collaborations with musicians such as Marilyn Manson. The visually stylistic parallels are undeniable when you look back at these early music videos in comparison to Begotten, a film that has yet to be matched either in substance, style or cinematic effectiveness.
Shot in stark B&W quite often with the film either under or over exposed (it's not that easy, but you'd think it was), Begotten transcends the techniques of traditional filmmaking as we know it. The narrative contains no dialogue, just sparse amounts of music and chilling sound effects. What's so amazing about the whole experience is how much raw emotion is actually expressed through the camera lens without any actual dialogue or narration. The task of explaining either the story or the incredible effectiveness of Begotten is a tough one. This is a film that needs to be seen to be believed and it's an experience that you're not likely to forget any time soon after viewing. The powerful visuals of Begotten are destined to stay with you for quite some time, and you'll likely watch the bulk of this film wide eyed and jaw dropped.
Begotten is quite a cinematic marvel for many reasons (too many to list here, one can go on for days about this film). Most importantly, Merhige is able to create a film that contains images that are so foreign, yet they appear as if they're being documented live as if they are really happening at the moment. This is a true cinematic accomplishment and something that is not easy to pull off. These are images that seem so unfamiliar, yet the film plays off as if these events are really being documented, right here and right now. The deliberate visuals are quite astounding, the look of this film could never have been achieved by mistake.
Begotten is presented on DVD in a full frame transfer that looks as good as one could expect for a film of this nature. As far as the anomalies on the actual print, it's hard to decipher what's intentional and what is not. This is not my first time viewing this film, and I do feel comfortable in saying that this is about as accurate a representation of Begotten as we've seen on home video to date. Audio is presented in mono and sounds just fine. There is no audio distortion, music and sound effects are also accurately represented on this DVD edition.
Extras include a brief still gallery, a wicked theatrical trailer and some brief production notes (which explain how the look of the film was actually achieved). Also included is a collector's booklet with a brief essay and interview with Merhige.
Begotten is an extremely important film and in my opinion is not to be missed by any true self-respecting fan of cinema. This is not a film for everyone Adam Sandler fans beware. Only truly adventurous moviegoers need apply. Just like film school nerds look back on Battleship Potemkin and Un Chien Andalou now, in years to come, they'll look back on Begotten under the same light. Begotten is true cinema and a prime example of raw power and emotion. Visually stunning and frightening all at the same time, Begotten could be one of the most important DVD cinematic experiences you will ever have. Plain and simple, Begotten is a beautifully horrific vision, don't miss it.» - Lawrence P. Raffel

«Elias Merhige, born in 1964, grew up in Brooklyn, and went to school in Tenafly, New Jersey before attending film school at State University of New York at Purchase where he received a bachelor's degree in 1987. This exclusive interview concerns the making of his controversial non-dialogue feature film, BEGOTTEN. The interview was conducted for DIRECTED BY Magazine at the time of the release of SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE, Merhige’s first feature. Special DVD copies of BEGOTTEN are now being made available as a not-for-profit item by DIRECTED BY Magazine for a short time only.
What was the earliest genesis of "Begotten"?
- With "Begotten", I was working with a lot of actors and artists at the time, and I had a small theatre company in New York. And we were doing a lot of experimental theatre. And it was the sort of thing where I had envisioned "Begotten"--I mean, a lot of my influences at the time were Antony Narto's theories on theatre and art. You know, I mean like the theatre and its double; theatre as play: all of these very luminal essays about aesthetics and what theatre needed to be in the 20th century. And one of the things that was really important, I thought, was that I had never really seen any of Barto's ideas or any of these very powerful ideas on aesthetics that Nietzsche had about plays and early Greek drama, and I hadn't seen any of it on film. I mean really to its fullest extent. And so it was the kind of thing where at the time--I wrote the script when I was 20.
And I originally thought of it as a dance theatre with live music piece that we would do at Lincoln Center. I was making it up as I was going along. But then I found out what it would cost to get the theatre space, what it would cost.... And it would actually cost me, at the time, a quarter of a million dollars to produce the show. And so I thought, "It's weird. There’s got to be a better way to do this." Then the challenge became, really, creating the world. Because "Begotten" really is a world more than anything. It's a world. And so that got me into shifting my whole focus into making a film.
Now how long of a period, from when you wrote the script to when you said, "Okay. I want to do this as a film."?
- About six months.
And you were in your early 20s at the time?
- Yeah. And I finished the film when I was.... It took me three and a half years to make the film. That was not because of money. It was because--I built the optical printer that I did all the special effects on. I did all of the cinematography, all of the special effects, everything. And it was really a very powerful experience. It changed the lives of every single person involved with the film. It was really one of these transformative, ritualistic experiences, where the experience itself became what it was about, and the film was just ancillary to the experience. And--sort of like the experience was the flame--and the work itself, the film, sort of became like the vapor, the light coming off the flame. But that was a very powerful experience. But one of the challenges with that film was that it got me into the whole investigative process of "All right, if you want to create something that you haven't seen before, how do you do it?"
And so I would just talk to everybody. I would call people up. I would call my new cinematographers and sit down with them for hours and talk to them. I would go to--I went to every laboratory in New York City, sat down with their timers, with their developers, and asked them how they--what is it about developing film, and if you develop it higher than the normal mean or lower than the normal mean in terms of the temperature of the developer bath, what does it do to the film? And they would do these experiments for me, and I would actually look at this stuff. You know, people are really helpful. And then I got ahold of a 16mm Aeroflex camera that was borrowed to me, and I started doing every experiment in the world, sort of developing my own film. I started doing just every conceivable thing from in a darkroom on rewinds running the unshot negative through sandpaper, you know, to scratch the negative before I shot on it.

And I still wasn't getting the results that I thought I really needed. And then one day, in the conversation, somebody told me about the kind of control that you have with an optical printer. And when it came time to try and make a deal to get an optical printer, it turned out that it would have cost me millions of dollars to have an optical printer for the amount of time that I needed it. And to buy an optical printer would cost me, at the time, since that was what they used to do special effects at the time--there was no CGI -- the cost of an optical printer at the time was more than--you know, between a quarter and a half million dollars.
This is late 80s or so?
- Yeah. Late 80s. Mid- to late 80s. So I built one. And I went around getting parts from different camera places, different special effects houses, and they would each say, "Hey, we're not using this old..." I mean, I had an old 1936 Mitchell camera, like number 13. It was just this horse. This workhorse. And then I had a friend of mine that was an electronics engineer out at Brown. And I drove him crazy. I don't think he talked to me for years after helping me with the electronics on it. And then I used an Italian projection gate from the 1940s.
How did you get these parts? Were they paid for, or did you get them--did people loan...?
- They were things that no one was using, and they just had it. It was like just part of their inventory. And they said, "No one on earth is ever going to use this. You can have this." And I would give them like a laundry list of things that I needed, and they would say, "Well, we don't have exactly that, but we have this." And then what I would do is say, "Okay, if I modify this, if I machine it in a slightly different way--can I do that?" And they would say, "Yeah. Sure." When I needed money, I just went to these guys and said, "I'll do some special effects for you. If you guys ever get overloaded with work, I'll do it for you for like half of what any of your other cameramen would do it for." And that was still a lot of money. That's how I paid for the sound mix for "Begotten", doing all that stuff.
For various different people? Small little jobs?
- Various different people. Yeah. There was like Disney jobs--there were just various different things they farmed out to me. There was this one rotoscope job that was like six seconds of this old man looking up at a spire and there was blue screen in the back, and they wanted mountains in the background. They wanted the sun to go down, the stars to come up and the moon to rise over one of the mountains. So a friend of mine, Michelle, rotoscoped the whole thing. Airbrushed the stars in, animated the whole thing, and it looked fantastic. It was actually cool doing it. I forgot that it was for a movie or anything--it was just like my own little six-second world.
You optically printed it off the film yourself?
- Yeah. Everything was done on film. Everything was done very physical. There were no CGI or no computer elements. "Begotten" was shot in 16mm.
So the optical printer could be used for either?
- Yup. All you got to do is just take a different camera - you know, I had a 16 camera mount. I used to take that off, put a 35 on. Which in hindsight, I mean, that's what I should have done. I could have just blown up the film myself instead of.... But that's something I plan on doing. I do plan on blowing up "Begotten" to 35. Not that it needs to be blown up--I just feel like doing it. Then I did the sound. And the amazing thing, and the parallel between that film and "Shadow of the Vampire" is that there was a very Zen-like incredible experience in directing "Begotten". Because I am looking through the camera, operating the camera, speaking to the actors; and I'm seeing an idea that's coming out of my imagination becoming flesh and blood in the characters and friends that I'm working with. Then that's being reflected back into the camera and recorded onto the film. And it's like this process where it's moving out of my brain into flesh and blood and back into the lens onto film. It was just an extraordinary thing to be able to speak, and--well--"Begotten" is a silent, obviously.
Non-dialogue. Was there ever a point in which you thought, "It's my first film. I'm already directing it. I've already written it." Was it an artistic choice to say, "I should also operate the camera. I should also star in all the stuff myself." Did you ever feel like you wanted another point of view?
- No. It felt very natural. There was a great deal of innocence to making "Begotten". It just felt like--well, I was so curious about all the different things that needed to [be done].... And it was such a homemade, handmade, handcrafted piece of work that it just made sense that [I crew everything myself].... Because I'm sort of neurotic anyway, when it comes to doing things. I have to just know that something is done, and when it's done, that it's done properly.
Where was "Begotten" photographed?
- There were three or four different locations, but the main one was a construction site right on the border of New York State and New Jersey, just at the northern part of New Jersey. And they were constructing this corporate park. They were making this huge corporate park. And it--and they just had devastated the landscape. So I had talked to the engineer, the main engineer that was engineering all the groundwork there, and told them what I was doing. And they actually--they thought I was crazy at first, but when I explained to them how I was doing it and what I was doing... I don't know. It was the sort of thing where, I guess, they felt sorry for me, you know, and they just decided, "Yeah, you can shoot that movie here."
And then, on top of it, as time went on, I told them, "You know, the composition is almost perfect." And I would have them look through the lens, you know? And I'd say, "If it just had a mountain right there, you know? If it just had a mountain of rock just right over there to the right, it would be perfect." And they would make one for me. They would bring in bulldozers and heavy dump trucks and they would just make a mountain. It was remarkable.
You didn't have to pay for the location at all?
- No.
How long were you there? How many days in the quarry?
- Would you believe it was just like 20 days. It was all weekends. My agreement was that I would shoot when they weren't working. And their agreement was to have all their equipment out so I could shoot. [20 days in the quarry for the last third of the film… earlier in the film was at a lake. The middle section was in a house.] A friend of mine was going to hook me up with some Indian friends of his down in Santa Fe or Albuquerque. And they were going to take me on this like fun ritual thing that they were doing in the mountains. Anyway, I never hooked up with them, for some reason--miscommunications. So I ended up going into the mountains myself anyway, and shooting some of those sunrises.
I spent a couple of days just shooting time-lapse sunrises and sunsets. That's where you get that big flat expansive [view]. And with that film, you know, that was the idea that I didn't want you to be able to tell the difference between the moon and the sun. And whether it was day or night. It's just this idea: we have opposites just colliding and coming together. And then when I finished the film, it took me two years to get it out there.
I mean, I would show it to distributors and people out there, and they would say, "Listen, if you can show this for free in some high school basement in the Bronx, you're lucky." And I know people that were really brutal, and I hated them. And I just had this sort of "Well, what do they know?" kind of attitude. And then the film went to the San Francisco International Film Festival. And it was there that Peter Scarlet and Tom Luddy showed the film to Susan Sontag, who then called me up. And I projected the film in her living room for like 21 of her closest friends, and it was remarkable. Because she brought it to the Berlin Film Festival, and said just wonderful things about the film, that.... She used the word "masterpiece". I hate to use that word, but she really loved the film and thought it was just a profoundly original piece of work. And then Werner Herzog had seen the film at just about the same time. And he, also, was very supportive. He was very supportive of the film.
Did Sontag get the film to Nicolas Cage somehow? How did Nicolas end up seeing it?
- Crispin Glover had given Nick a copy of "Begotten" as either a birthday present or just as a gift. And Nick, just out of his own volition, saw the film and said, "You know, I'm moved by this piece of work." And then when he opened a production company, Saturn Films, he gave the videotape of "Begotten" to his partner at the time, Jeff Levant. And said, "We need to find this guy, 'cause I'd like to work with him." And that's the way it evolved from there. And then we met, and a 45-minute meeting turned into a three-hour meeting, and we realized that we all liked each other very much as people. And three days later, they sent me the script to "Shadow of the Vampire". And when I first read that script--you know all that stylistic stuff, with going from color to black-and-white and black-and-white to color? That was stuff that I saw from the first reading of the script.
I knew exactly how to do it. And that's what I loved so much about the script is that it was this great balance between technical innovation and great story-telling. And for me, I knew that I could make something really terrific out of this.
How long did you spend in post on "Begotten"?
- That was what took all the time.
That was three years?
- Yes. It took me eight months to build the optical printer.
That's with film in the can?
- Yes. That just drove me up the wall. 'Cause if it's just a hair off, it's off. That's all. It doesn't work. And it just looks stupid. And it's wrong. Everything has to be very exact.
How long on the sound mix? ...the whole movie--about 88 minutes of sound effects.
- Got to tell you--that soundtrack--that was something that Evan Album--he's a guy that a friend of mine at the time, (he was the assistant director on "Begotten", Tim McCann), had a friend of his who was painting people's houses--not doing frescoes, just painting the houses. And I met this guy, and I was talking to him and I was just having regular conversation with him 'cause we were both waiting for Tim. And it was, "Well, what do you do besides painting houses?" And "I compose music." I go "Really?" "Yeah." I go, "On what? What instrument's your instrument of choice?" He says, "On the bass guitar." I said, "Really? You compose music for the bass guitar. I've never heard music composed just for the bass guitar." I said, "I'd like to listen to it." So he gave me a tape. And there was nothing in this tape, in this recording that sounded remotely like a bass guitar. This guy was functioning on a totally, completely different plane of existence. And it was at that moment that I thought, "This guy is the kind of person....," 'Cause when you talk to composers, they're all like, "Hey! This is the happy--this is my happy stuff.
Oh, this is my scary stuff. Oh!" And with this guy, it was not like that at all. And that soundtrack took a year to do, because--this is going to sound a bit odd, but--we recorded the sound of feet walking on gravel in the winter, feet walking on gravel in the spring, feet walking on gravel in the summer, and feet walking on gravel in the autumn. And used all of them at different points in the film and orchestrated all of that in this careful kind of like mosaic within the film. That's how obsessively detailed that film was. I spent every frame--I mean, I was looking through the camera every single frame.... Just remember, there's 24 frames in a second. And 24 frames in a second, it would take me about 10 hours of time to get about a minute's worth of screen time, of film. When you think about that ratio of labor, it's very intense.
At first, did you let many people see it?
- And in the beginning, when I finished it, I was very protective of it. 'Cause there were people that hated the film and just didn't care whether it got out there or didn't get out there. So I was very protective of it. And there was never a moment that I didn't totally believe in the film. I always believed in the film. And it's that sort of thing where, when Susan Sontag saw it, it was a major epiphany and pinnacle in my own consciousness. Because it was like, "Okay. Now somebody who I've always revered and respected believes in my work. And believes that it's great." And I knew it was great, but when you have it mirrored off of someone who is great, like Susan Sontag, it enables you to suffer all the crap that you have to go through to get a film off the ground, get something out of development hell and into reality.
You were able to get it out there somehow?
- The film was distributed on VHS. So people could buy it from Virgin Megastore. It wasn't just myself that had to give them a copy of the tape. Rocket Video had the film. Jerry's Video over in Hillhurst that has the film as well. The thing, for me, in making a film, is I that have to just be 300% in love with what it is that I'm doing. I'm not going to spend two or three years of my life on something that I'm half-hearted about, you know?
My take on “Begotten” is pretty clearly that this divine being, in the beginning, is almost sacrificing himself for the birth of the next generation, which becomes Mother Earth... Actually, in the film, Mother Earth comes from behind him. And...
- She's sort of born from him in a very theatrical way.
Yeah. Born out of him, and he's dead. And then ejaculates him...
- Yeah. Inseminates herself.
And then from that comes....
- Comes this new world order.
Who's, hey, got a tough life. Almost an oppressive kind of way...
- Well, it's interesting, 'cause you have this, like, the patriarchal world, sacrificing itself, giving birth to this matriarchal world, that then gives birth to this new kind of, like, child, who's a balance between the masculine and the feminine, the earth and the sky, and then is ultimately sort of sacrificed....
But then begets greenery and the earth as we know it. Which was a neat effect. I'm sure you did that on your optical printer.
- Yeah. I did a lot of that with time lapse, too. In a terrarium, I had little things growing.
A small terrarium?
- No, a large terrarium. And--but it's the kind of thing where--with "Begotten", I always felt that, having been a big Nietzsche fan at the time, this idea of circularity of time, the idea of the eternal return, the idea that everything is a circle or a sphere.... And certainly Einstein's theory of relativity, you know, that if you go in two opposite directions, you're eventually going to meet again. 'Cause the world through Einsteinian physics is spherical--the universe is spherical. So, it's the idea that--imagine that we had a culture, like 4,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago, that had the technology with cinema, to make movies. And that you're looking into a sort of archaeological discovery of this world, that is now extinct, and was sort of a pre--predecessor to the world that we live in today.
When the earth was really new.
- Yeah, exactly.
And I took the band of quote, kind of "lepers" or whoever, just to be sort of the outcast, the marginalized and the decrepit of the earth, who don't know what they're doing. Almost--I'm not specifically a religious person--but I almost read it as a Christian metaphor of sorts, where Jesus was born to a world that didn't appreciate him, and he died for the sins of all the others. In that this new being died for their sins, even though they didn't know what they were doing. Here they have this naked thing, who's been born of Mother Earth and God, and they....
- And they don't even realize it.
And they don't realize it and they beat him and kill him. And he begets the rest.
- I think that's very beautiful what you just said. And I don't think that's off the mark. But the thing is, you go not just to the mythology of Jesus, but also to Isis and Osiris, and you go back to Attus and Adonis, and it goes way back to be the pre-Christian ideas and, then certainly with the idea of creation as it exists in the Hebraic sense, in the Old Testament. It's just these themes of sacrifice and resurrection are in every culture and every age. And they're important themes. And I love art that is charged with both pathos and mythos. And you see it in Arnold Bachland's paintings. You see it in a lot of expressionist and symbolist paintings. And you certainly see it in the romantic paintings, and in the Romantic poets like Byron and Shelley. And in Goethe, the German poet. All these voices from the past definitely have influenced me to a very profound degree. And I feel like--that being inspired by these minds and by these works of art from hundreds of years ago, I imbue it into my own blood and invigorate it with a new life and put it out into a new--in a new way, through film and--through the films that I'm making.
Also the elements in both of your films--regarding themes of sacrifice and all that--there's also sort of a haunting feeling throughout both of the films. I think that what's happening in "Begotten" isn't entirely pleasant. It's interesting. It's always sort of fascinating, but it's also upsetting.
- No. Absolutely.
Much in the way that any martyr, who has to suffer for others' sins or whatever--it's not the most pleasant thing ever. And same with "Shadow of the Vampire", too. It's always super-interesting, and a reflection on things you said about current filmmaking. But it's also kind of haunting. These people are disappearing, and is Schreck really killing them? And then you start to think, "He really is a vampire. Or at least he thinks he is. And that's enough."
- I can't tell you how much I appreciate you seeing "Begotten", and having an appreciation of that film. 'Cause I love that film, really. I never thought about, "Oh, I'm going to go to Hollywood with "Begotten" and I'm going to be a big movie director." It was the kind of thing where I made "Begotten" just purely like a fever. It was like a fever that hit me, and then, when the film was done, the fever broke, and it passed. It was somewhat of an obsession and a great, profound love, making that film. And I learn something new from that film every time that I see it. I don't feel like its maker. I feel like it's got its own life force, and every time I see the film, I'm learning something new from it.» - Scott Essman