Begotten (1991)

[xylokopos]

The film is described in the opening card as an incantation of matter. What is most interesting to me is not so much its nightmarish theology or the substitution of language with the suffering of the flesh but the familiar images it invokes, even when it is almost dissolving into static or shadow play: victims of firebombings. Holodomor. Doré's Hell. [or perhaps this is the film acting as a Rorschach Test, as was mentioned before, and how this borderline visual cacophony appears to me]

There are also both christian and pre-christian symbols at work surrounding mutilation, cannibalism and ritual sacrifice. But it in the end I think it is about flesh convulsing and life feeding on life and the perpetual cycle of predation; it might even be a materialist's view of life clothed or disguised as theogony and deicide.

Begotten (original) - 1991 E. Elias Merhige - YouTube