Merhige: Begotten (1990)

Begotten attempts nothing less than to recapture the peculiar horror and uncanniness the very earliest silent cinema might have offered to its audiences. A largely abstract, ambient film, detailing the ritualistic birth and death of some kind of supernatural being, it's as much a work of sculpture as of cinema – Merhige apparently spent at least an hour on each frame, and the print is so evocatively manipulated, handled and distorted that it’s often hard to tell where image ends and glitch begins (in some ways, it feels as if the exhibition and inspection of the print itself is an integral part of the experience). Apart from capturing the enormous affinity between silent cinema and occult ceremony – watching it is a bit like reading viscera for signs – it conjures up a time when the gap between celluloid and human perception was so great that cinema wasn’t yet a predominantly realist medium. At least, it often feels like an attempt to think through the perception of people before they had cinema to deflect and direct their sense of reality – as well as their capacity to dream, since the images only feel capable of being seen in the same way as images in a dream can be seen, as projections on the back of an eyelid. Released in 1990, it might be argued that it’s ahead of its time in the way it anticipates found footage horror, except that it remains innovative in the way it treats all silent cinema as found footage – insofar as there are references to later silent cinema, it’s as an unrestored medium, just as Merhige works to unrestore our familiarity with the body, taking us back to those earliest films when all its familiar positions, postures and movements were learned anew. 

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