Begotten (1991 film)
| Begotten | |
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Release poster
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| Directed by | E. Elias Merhige |
| Produced by | E. Elias Merhige |
| Written by | E. Elias Merhige |
| Starring |
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| Music by | Evan Albam |
| Cinematography | E. Elias Merhige |
| Edited by | Noëlle Penraat |
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Production
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Theatre Of Material
William Markle Associates (Sound) |
| Distributed by | World Artists (All media) |
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Release date
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Running time
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72 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | Silent |
| Budget | $33,000 (estimated) |
Begotten is a 1990 American experimental dark fantasy horror film written, produced, edited and directed by E. Elias Merhige. It narrates the story of Genesis while re-imagining it.
Begotten is considered by Merhige himself as the start of an unofficial trilogy. There is a prologue to the intended second installment in the trilogy, which is the 14-minute short Din of Celestial Birds, which deals with evolution and premiered in 2006 on Turner Classic Movies, and was shot in similar visual fashion as Begotten.
The story opens with a robed, profusely bleeding "God" disemboweling itself, with the act ultimately ending in its death. A woman, Mother Earth, emerges from its remains, brings the dead body to arousal, and inseminates herself with its semen. Becoming pregnant, she wanders off into a vast and barren landscape. The pregnancy manifests in a fully grown convulsing man whom she leaves to his own devices.
The "Son of Earth" meets a group of faceless nomads who seize him with what is either a very long umbilical cord or a rope. The Son of Earth vomits organic pieces, and the nomads excitedly accept these as gifts. The nomads finally bring the man to a fire and burn him. "Mother Earth" encounters the resurrected man and comforts him. She seizes the man with a similar umbilical cord. The nomads appear and proceed to rape her. Son of Earth is left to mourn over the lifeless body.
A group of characters appear and carry Mother Earth to another place, where they dismember her, later returning for Son of Earth. After he, too, is dismembered, the group buries the remains, planting the parts into the crust of the earth. The burial site becomes lush with flowers. Grainy photographs of God Killing Himself are shown. In a final scene, "Mother Earth" and "Son of Earth" are seen again in a flashback, this time wandering through a forest.
Begotten was written, produced, and directed by Edmund Elias Merhige. Development for the film began in 1984. Merhige, who owned a small theatre production company in New York City at the time, had worked on several different experimental theatre productions up to that point and was working on developing his next project. He had originally intended for the film to be a theatre production, and later recalled: "I originally thought of it as a dance theatre with live music piece that we would do at Lincoln Center." It was only after discovering that it would cost a quarter of a million dollars to produce that Merhige decided to make the script into a motion picture. Merhige, who was twenty at the time he wrote the script, was inspired by the theories and ideas of Antonin Artaud and Friedrich Nietzsche, which in his opinion had not been developed on film to the fullest extent.Film critic Eric D. Snider pointed out that David Lynch's Eraserhead might have influenced the film's visual style as well. The film incorporates many different religious themes and events from Christian and Slavic mythology including Creation, Mother Earth, and various other religious themes on which the events that take place in the film are loosely based.
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