BEGOTTEN (WITH LIVE SOUNDTRACK)
Fabrica Gallery, Brighton,
Thurs 8th Sept
“Metaphysical splatter movie”
'Begotten' has been cited as the twenty-third most disturbing film ever made. (Though I have heard that others consider it only the 27th or even the 28tj.) Though it is
graphically violent... in fact it's pretty much perpetually
graphically violent, to the point that if we started with trigger
warnings we probably wouldn't be able to stop, 'disturbing' is the
most fitting term. Certainly more accurate than 'horrific' or
'visceral'.
Though sometimes described as Surreal,
this film has no relation to Pop Surrealism with it's glossy pictures
of eyes superimposed upon candles. It more took my mind back to the
'Undercover Surrealism' exhibition at the Hayward. (I was
about to say 'recent', but seems it was a decade ago!) This is
Surrealism with the Freud and Nietzsche turned up to eleven. A
soundbite description might be the savage opening of 'Un
Chien Andalou' extended to film length.
Inevitably people search for meaning in
all of this. But the best place to look is actually on the surface. As Greg Smalley comments: “what gives 'Begotten'
its staying power is its unique look… the 'meaning' of the film is
contained in the moving image itself; the experience of the film is
itself what it is 'about'. To reduce 'Begotten'
from image to language would be a mistake. The film begins with an
incantation rebuking the 'language makers': 'you, with your memory,
are dead, frozen'. It immediately invokes a different sort of
language, 'the incantation of matter'.”
Certainly, without this look the film
might well descend into mere torture porn. Director E. Elias Murhige
spent months achieving those filtered, distressed effects, including
such devices as running the film past sandpaper. In fact he was so
keen on achieving this that one minute of film could take up to ten
hours to process. Combined with the film being silent, it creates
something literally timeless - almost impossible to pin to an era.
Nor are there any signifiers within the film - the bleak landscape
looks some strange combination of post-industrial and pre-natural,
bare trees and bare pipes, broken-down houses. It could even hail
from the glory days of Surrealism themselves, were it not so
unconstrained by censorship. (The actual date is 1990, which seems
refreshingly arbitrary.)
In fact, it results in a film that's
very hard to pin to anything. With the contrasts so strong it's less
in black-and-white than is
black-and-white. It somehow looks simultaneously unremittingly
graphic and strangely elusive, like you're no more sure what you're
looking at than how to take it.
And it feels timeless even as you watch
it. Scenes play out to an almost absurd length, past any narrative
point which they might be expected to convey. The point is less
narrative than experiential, like what we're watching is a ritual.
The end credits give post-hoc names to
the characters, which acts as a kind of retrospective key to
proceedings. That figure in the opening commits slow ritual slaughter
through repeated self-stabs, we come to know he's God Killing
Himself. (A great entry for an actor to have on his CV.) Yet the
result of his slow suicide isn't the end of things but the begetting
of another figure, Mother Earth. She and her son, Flesh and Bone, who
appears to be in a perpetual state of catatonic tremor, are then
repeatedly assaulted by hooded figures. Those figures would seem to
represent humanity (you know, us), but are entirely anonymised and
undifferentiated. Its the divine victims you follow. (Even if you
can't really say 'identify with'.)
God kills himself through stabs to the
stomach, which seems an image of sexual penetration. Mother Earth
then impregnates herself with his semen. While disembowelling also
seems associated with pregnancy. The images being only
semi-decipherable also mitigates against the sense of separation
which you think of as being inherent to film. These should be a
strong difference between seeing a figure self-harming and a group
beating and torturing another. But here there isn’t really. Mother
and Son do not resist their fate at the hands of the humans, but
largely bear it without even expression. And the humans are in
somewhere between a state of ritual trance and workaday drudgery –
slaughter as labour. It adds up to signify a world at war with
itself.
What's this a film about? I'd be tempted
to glibly answer - about four months. That part of the year where
Winter passes into Spring, where (at least in times past) our
survival was at its most difficult and our ravaging of nature was at
it's harshest and most desperate. At the end of the film, we see
vegetation start to sprout. Remember the old Coil lyric “kill to
keep the world turning”? That about covers it.
But it's simultaneously cosmogenic,
particularly with the opening scene of the self-harming God. The
title literally explains Mother Earth and Son, but it also alludes to
how we all came to be here. And that recurrence, the duplication of
events at different scales like mandelbrots, is a common feature of
mythology. We're reminded of our visceral begetting with each passing of the seasons.
Through the Judeo-Christian tradition
we have become used to external creators conjuring our universe up
out of nothing, magic words making matter. But that's a relatively
recent development. Creation myths are more commonly based around the
primacy of sacrifice, either of the self or another. The material
world is sometimes held to be the dead body of a cosmic being,
slaughtered at the start of time.
Commentators often spend their time
trying to pin this film to a particular myth or myth system. All they
are really doing is showing off their reading list. The point is that
it's not based in a myth so much as in
myth, in it's totality.
One reason, beyond all the obvious
ones, for this film not being better known is that Murhige is keen
for it to be seen only in cinemas. I suspect he's right. The way to
see it is in a public showing, not just for the big screen but for
the sake of ceremony. Certainly it was a rare experience to see it in
the 'right' way.
The live soundtrack came from the
presumably bespoke band the Begotten. If the film has an
anti-narrative, the soundtrack was an anti-composition, aimed at
creating mood music for the screen – and all the better for it. It
started very slightly with the 'singer' (if that's the word) emitting
the eeriest of vocals while hidden in the Church pulpit. The other
players processed onto stage some time later, well after the film had
begun, dropping and dragging chains as they went. Though guitar and
bass were involved they rarely played conventional sounds, and
effectively were mixed in with the electronics.
If the film shouldn't really be watched
on-line, perhaps the trailer's okay...
MYSTERY DICK + YOAF
Caroline of Brunswick, Brighton, Fri
15th Sept
It's been four years since Mystery Dick last played Brighton. In fact, as I learn on arrival,
it's been four years since they've played. But their sound has moved
on considerably in the meantime, even if no-one's heard the interim
steps.
It's still the hum of Sixties-style
electric organ. But the previous outing was like the soundtrack to
some long-lost black-and-white B movie, which you might have seen
years ago on late night TV or may have just imagined. Whereas this
time it was more taking from Sixties popular music. (Symbolised
nicely by the CD from the last gig being packaged in a 7” single
sleeve, see below.) Albeit a pretty unusual take.
Sixties music often sounds in
retrospect like the edict hadn't yet gone out that you could go
beyond song form, and you can hear players straining against the
walls. So imagine taking the mini-breaks permitted in those
three-minute singles, then using Kool Herc's DJ trick of repeating to
extend them. While combined with Photshop's ability to go close up to
400%. And done live.
Ed Pinsent played a series of
increasingly agitated organ stabs, like some long forgotten twenty
second keyboard solo had continued in the echo chamber of an
alternate dimension until it was played out. Which segued into Harley
Richardson swapping his organ for guitar feedback, the classic way to
end one of those singles.
That I figured must be the climax, but
they went beyond my little mental schema to break into a whole new
section. Whereas previously, one had always led they now both
contributed to a much more meditative piece, which was soon to prove
my favourite part of the set. It was admittedly a slightly uneven
performance. The recited vocal parts in particular seemed too 'art
happening'. And it needed time and a little audience indulgence to
unfurl it's wings. But when it did it was off.
So, after the Static Memories, this
marks the second time I've gone to see Mystery Dick and ended up
preferring another act on the bill. I expect I will be thrown out of
their fan club any day now. After Yoaf had done their thing, someone cried the name Coil. A cry not made in
vain, for there was the same sense of players being less musicians
than sound mediums, tuning into and channelling uncanny forces of
some description.
Their weapons of choice were strings
and springs. One took to the strangest of spring-sprung devices,
looking like one of those things you find in old junk shops which you
can't play after midnight, and when you go back the junk shop isn't
there any more. (You know the sort of thing.) While the other played
a long plank of wood strung with strings, a steel guitar for the most
lo-fi of lo-fi enthusiasts, which he'd bow or even attack with a
hammer. Other instruments were employed along the way, all either
found or home-made.
Perhaps unusually for an impro act, one
normally took the lead – striking up the eeriest of rhythms, but
rhythm nonetheless, for the other to play around. Though the baton
passed so effortlessly back and forth between them they scarcely fell
into assigned roles. Initially playing along to a loop they were able
to build their set up quickly, then pulled the loop to turn to
sparser more etherial sounds, breaking the standard model of instant
composition that the sounds build up over time.
The standard duo (of Tim Yates and Tom
Fox) were augmented by a guest (whose name alas now escapes me). His
mumbled, intonatory vocals ostensibly contributed the least, and he
even stood downstage of the others with head bowed – less frontman
than backman. Yet it was hard to imagine their sound without him.
Perhaps we are used to vocals being a recognisable, even explanatory
element of music, so to defamilarise them takes our handholds away.
Despite hailing from London, this is
apparently the first time Yoaf have played Brighton. The audience was
admittedly small, but appreciative. So hopefully they will be
persuaded back.
Some Mystery Dick...
...and a little Yoaf...
Coming soon! Yes, I'm a bit behind on these posts again. Blame it on my summer holidays...
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