Begotten is a 1989 American experimental horror film written and directed by E. Elias Merhige. It stars the largely unknown actors Brian Salzburg, Donna Dempsey, Stephen Charles Barry and members of Merhige's theatre company Theatreofmaterial. Its unconventional narrative depicts the suicide of a godlike figure and the births of Mother Earth and the Son of Earth, who undertake a journey across a dying world. Merhige directed two short film sequels: 2006's Din of Celestial Birds and 2022's Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera.
Merhige conceived Begotten as a dance piece for experimental theatre. It has a gritty visual style, intended to evoke film stock degraded through time and wear. Inspired by documentary footage of the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, he decided on a feature film. As with the Hiroshima footage, Begotten is silent.
Begotten is infused with mystic and religious themes. Critics have debated whether it reflects popular attitudes towards the origins of life and religion at the time of its production and portrays creation through the mythic and religious traditions. Some writers have interpreted the film as an examination of the cycle of life and mankind's relationship with nature. Other themes include the Nietzschean view of order and chaos, societal norms and the perception of reality.
After completion, Merhige spent two years trying to find a distributor. It debuted at the Montreal World Film Festival and later screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, with the film critics Tom Luddy and Peter Scarlet in attendance. The two brought it to the attention of the critic Susan Sontag, whose praise was instrumental to its eventual release. It received few reviews, which were mainly polarized.
Plot The film opens on a dilapidated shack, inside which a robed and masked figure disembowels himself with a straight razor. He dies after cutting open his abdomen and removing his internal organs. A woman in white emerges from his remains. She brings the corpse to arousal and uses his semen to impregnate herself. Time passes and the woman, now visibly pregnant, stands beside a coffin. She gives birth to a fully matured yet malformed man and leaves him lying in the wilderness, convulsing violently and unable to walk.
Soon a tribe of robed nomads arrive, seize him and drag him away by his umbilical cord. He vomits part of his organs, which the tribe accept as gifts. They lead him through a rocky hillside, stopping to drag him into a fire pit where they repeatedly stab him with a fork-like implement and appear to collect some of his blood. They then carry him to a hill and leave him to die. His mother then returns, places a rope around his neck and leads him into a forest as he crawls spasmodically behind her. Later in a quarry, the nomads reappear and strike his head with a club before attacking him with a large stick as his mother stands trance-like nearby.
The nomads fatally cudgel his mother before sexually assaulting her body with their clubs and raping her corpse while her son lies injured. As the nomads leave and the woman's son kneels before her body and mourns her, two robed figures arrive to cover her corpse and carry it away. They travel to a gorge where they and their companions harvest mounds of clay into small jars. The robed men cut the mother's body into small pieces, crushing her bones and placing them into the jars. Meanwhile the son has crawled through a desert and reached the sea some distance away, where the robed men find him, tie him in a sack and murder him, repeating the same process and burying the jars into the crust of the earth. Over time, the burial site becomes lush with flowers and crops. The closing images present the mother, as before, leading her son into the forest as the cycle begins again.
Cast Brian Salzburg as God killing himself An entity who commits suicide by mutilating and disembowelling himself. He is also the father of Mother Earth and Son of Earth. Donna Dempsey as Mother Earth: The mother of the Son of Earth, whom she conceived by using the seed of God killing himself. Stephen Charles Barry as Son of Earth (captioned as Flesh on Bone): The deformed and convulsing son of Mother Earth and God killing himself.
Members of Merhige's theatre company Theatreofmaterial, including Adolpho Vargas, Arthur Streeter, Daniel Harkins, Erik Slavin, James Gandia, Michael Phillips and Terry Andersen, are credited as nomads and robed Figures.
Production Development Begotten was written, produced and directed by Merhige, who, following studies at State University of New York, developed an interest in the theatre after attending several performances while in Manhattan. According to Merhige, he was intrigued by the highly visualized form of storytelling, which provoked what he described as "an otherworldly response". He was particularly interested in the performances of the Japanese butoh dance troupe Sankai Juku, who were known for blending grotesque imagery with a transgressive dance style. Merhige was fascinated by the degree of interconnectivity among its core members—knowing everything about one another and engaging in a more personal level of interaction. In 1985, Merhige founded Theatreofmaterial, a small experimental theatre production company based in New York City, intending to create a similar group dynamic.
Merhige conceived Begotten in 1983, describing its genesis as "a vision that moved through me like a great storm". It was developed into a story format after Merhige suffered an episode of sleep paralysis. The sensation of "feel[ing] like you are dying" and being unable to move provided Merhige with inspiration, and after the symptoms subsided he began writing in an attempt to express his views and beliefs. The project was originally written as a dance or theatre production, with elements of opera and tragedy. Merhige envisioned the production as an immersive experience, with the sets built around its audience and performed with a live orchestra. After discovering that it would cost a quarter of a million dollars to produce, Merhige abandoned the idea. Merhige later decided to implement the concept into a motion picture after experimenting with his camera. This change in format allowed Merhige the opportunity to document Theatreofmaterial's work, as many of its performers were transitioning outside the company to pursue other interests.
Writing and pre-production
Merhige developed the script with members of Theatreofmaterial. They strove to evoke emotions which they felt were avoided by most directors and performers. Merhige consulted with the television writer and film historian Tom Gunning on the story. In preparation for script-writing, Merhige and members of Theatreofmaterial performed ritual breathing exercises. Merhige described this process as "breath[ing] to the point of hysteria". He brought portions of the work-in-progress script to rehearsals, which were followed by group discussion and reflection on the material as it took shape.
As a visual artist, Merhige said that 19th-century impressionist and symbolist painting were a primary source of influence, and had a profound impact on his crafting "a world that existed between painting and dreams". In addition, earlier paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya further influenced the film's early development. Merhige was further influenced by the artist Antonin Artaud and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, which he felt had not been fully explored on film.
The first draft was completed within six months. The group expanded the script's abstract ideas into more concrete and enactable scenes over the following four and a half months, during a period of extensive rehearsals. Merhige said that the rehearsals were mainly focused on group cohesion rather than specific choreography, which allowed the actors to get "in tune" with their characters.
Begotten was made on a budget of around $33,000 ($ in ). It was partially funded by Merhige's grandfather, who had set Merhige up with a trust fund for medical school. Additional costs were covered by Merhige from the income he received while working multiple jobs as a special effects artist. Writing on the distinction of such independent projects, Matthew Edwards comments that by financing independently, filmmakers like Merhige were allowed more creative freedom when developing their ideas.
Filming Principal photography began in the mid-to-late 1980s and depending on the sources, lasted for between three and five-and-a-half months. Merhige assumed multiple roles, including cinematography and special effects, and used a 16mm Arriflex camera on a Kodak Plus-X, a black-and-white reversal film stock. Most of the film crew were Theatreofmaterial members, though some film industry professionals were involved, including the costume designer Celia Bryant, and the special effects artist Dean Mercil. Some of Merhige's family assisted with production, including his brother David Merhige, who is credited as the film's field coordinator.
Most of the scenes were shot at a construction site between New York City and New Jersey, where Merhige was permitted to shoot for twenty days when construction crews were not working. The construction crew occasionally assisted by building landscapes for the mountains. The first scene to be filmed was the opening passage depicting God self-disembowelling and Mother Earth emerging from his remains. The sequence where the Son of Earth drags himself across the desert was filmed with a long-focus lens over hot sand, which produced a mirage-like screen distortion.
Time-lapse photographs of sunrises and sunsets were shot by the director, who spent two days in the mountains near Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Additional sequences of sprouting plants were filmed inside a large and specially built terrarium. Merhige characterized the atmosphere during production as a powerful, almost ceremonial experience that was "life-changing" for those involved. After filming wrapped up, Merhige found it difficult to move on from the project and felt a sense of mourning and the loss of an emotional high.
Cinematic style
Begotten is shot in a dark, grungy and visceral style. Distorted perspectives and degraded image quality were used to evoke an ancient and otherworldly atmosphere. The film has been described as "a cinematic Rorschach test of grotesque, imagery" and "a feature-length fever dream". Merhige was interested in crafting imagery through analog format and sought a decayed look that suggested the footage had been damaged through time and wear. He said:
The influences for Begotten visual style include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Blood of the Beasts (1949), Seven Samurai (1954) and The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971). He also lists the unconventional style Andrzej Munk, Sergei Eisenstein and Luis Buñuel. Other influences identified by critics include David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977), Dimitri Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant (1926) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), as well as tribal art, ethnographic studies and the paintings of Piero della Francesca. Visual underminings from 1930s horror films, such as intertitles, was also commented on by David Annwn Jones, who wrote that it was utilized to express its own set of evolving visual ideas and techniques.