Begotten

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You with your memory are dead, frozen

Lost in a present hat never stops passing

Here lives the incantation of matter

A language forever.

Begotten

Begotten begins with the violent storm of sunrise painting the black and white ruins of an old house in shades of milk-white and deep, black shadows; monochromatic reality, or some facsimile thereof. The poem, the visual poem paired with the minimalist, ambient score, unfurls before the viewer. Seated, tied to a chair, hands extended in shock, a hideous, repellent figure with what seems to be a Greek mask for a face uses a straight razor, of the kind commonly found at a barber’s shop, and slowly, almost mincingly, begins to disembowel itself, cutting a distinctive, nightmarish figure, a ghastly phantasm of ritual suicide in white, thick, dark blood and entrails spilling out onto the ruined floor.

The Sun, which goes down to its westward destruction at the culmination of every daily cycle, has bled, Christ-like, onto the gallows, from which hangs The Hanged Man, the messiah figure from whose symbolic birth emerges both The Empress and Death. In the case of the film, appearing from “behind the veil” (emerging from behind a curtain) and carrying a gravid, heavy belly, the pregnancy of Spring—the mother of The Fool, born from the self-immolation of Summer, the rising of the Moon, The Hanged Man ascendant.

This character, born from the Death of the World (Trump 21, or 22, depending on your numbering), The Fool and the Sacred Mother of Spring, Our Empress, carries with her a casket, Death; the sudden shift, the instantaneous change come riding in. But it is the Ten of Staffs, Oppression, which follows in her sacred wake.

She is likewise Our High Priestess (Trump number two, our dual pathways, analogous to the Two of Swords, also the Two of Cups, The Lovers, and, most pressingly here, The Devil). Our High Priestess rides in right behind The Magician, and that is what Begotten, the film, the symbolic visual poem, the Rorschach test for the cinematic consciousness (a dream awake) actually is.

Bizarre, hermit-like figures (The Hermit is Trump number 9) crawl like mud-covered savage insects across a barren landscape, captured in the grainiest monochromatic cinematography, rendering visual images confusing, obscure, clouded; one sees what one wants to see, often, until the image shifts, revealing itself, its meaning, like an animal camouflaged in the black and white pools of the surface image. Thus rendering an additional layer of interpretation to the film. (Already, the giant, dripping, hairy female pudenda of the Sacred Mother have been grasped as a collection of dark, dried grass; or so, the viewer thinks, until they realize, with shock, the extreme close-up they’re witnessing. It is from this giant extra-dimensional birth canal by which Death, entered the “real world” through the lamentable sin of Womanhood, is born—from the sacrifice of our Earth, the going down to darkness, the Catabasis of Demeter, descent into Hades, Hell, the Underworld, ruled by The Devil, trump number 15, which can be read as six and inversely, nine, the number of The Hermit.)

And then we’ve crossed the bridge of night, our descent into the underworld marked by The Moon (the Sun is being eviscerated slowly here). The mendicants, Hermits, monks drag their prisoner, their sacrifice—The Hanged Man, The Sun. (Tarot trump 10, which can also be read as 0 and 1, or The Fool and The Magician, rebirth and Initiation implicit in the Rising Dawn—the Aeon of Horus ascendant, as written of in Liber Al vel Legis.)

The ritual murder of this metaphysical quandary is commenced as a sacrifice while dug into the sacred earth—the Earth Mother, High Priestess drags Our Fool, The Sun, by a brutal noose. Movements, owing to the bizarre, pixelated technique employed by Merhige, are “looped”; frenetic, they seem more an outgrowth of some obscure organic process, such as in the early films of David Lynch, than actual physical movement.

The camera crawls slowly over excoriations and the deep, uglified surfaces of caked mud and dug trenches, hills and dips of earth, blasted heath. Everything is the backside of God, exposed for the muddy posteriors of some dreamlike divinity called forth by the roving, dreaming mind of the camera. In the end, flowers wither and die, but with the coming of the Light, The Sun, the Dawning of Spring (The Empress), we come to The World, trump 21. And that is the finale of a dream that could endlessly repeat, in the flickering gaze of the cinematic spell.

Begotten.

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