Begotten

Begotten is a 1989 American experimental horror film by Edmund Elias Merhige. It stars Brian Salsberg, Donna Dempsy, Stephen Charles Barry, and members of Merhige's theatre company, Theatreofmaterial. The film contains no dialogue and employs a style similar in some ways to early silent films. Its enigmatic plot, drawn from elements of various creation myths, opens with the suicide of a godlike figure and the births of Mother Earth and the Son of Earth, who set out on a journey of death and rebirth through a barren landscape. According to art historian Scott MacDonald, the film's allegorical qualities and purposeful ambiguity invite multiple interpretations. Begotten was first conceived as an experimental theatre piece with dance and live musical accompaniment, but Merhige switched to film after deciding that his vision was too expensive to achieve as a production for live audiences. Antonin Artaud and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche were major influences on Begotten, as Merhige believed their ideas and theories had not been explored in film to their full extent. The film's visual style was inspired by Georges Franju's Blood of the Beasts, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Begotten was shot on location in New York City and New Jersey over a period of three and a half years although, in an interview, Merhige said filming took only five and a half months. Once the film was finished, Merhige spent the next two years trying to find a distributor willing to market it. Following its debut at the Montreal World Film Festival, it was screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, with film critics Tom Luddy and Peter Scarlet in attendance. Fascinated by its visuals, the two brought it to the attention of fellow critic Susan Sontag, whose enthusiastic praise and private screening of the film to fellow critics and filmmakers in her own home were instrumental to its eventual release. Though largely ignored by mainstream critics, with existing reviews being mixed to positive, it has since attained cult film status and influenced several avant-garde film-makers, visual artists and musicians. The film's scarcity on home video prompted its fans to spread their own bootleg copies, a phenomenon described as a "copy-cult" by film studies scholar Ernest Mathijs.