BEGOTTEN (A WTF Friday Screening) / 1990/ USA/ Dir: E. Elias Merhige/ 72 Min/
“One of the most important films of modern times.”
– Susan Sontag
“One of the 10 most important films of modern times"
– Alex Heigl, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“A journey to Begotten’s realms is a mandatory pilgrimage for fans of truly weird cinema.”
– Gregory J. Smalley, 366 Weird Movies
From Director E. Elias Merhige:
Begotten has no characters in the ordinary sense. Its final credits name three principal figures:
God Killing Himself.
Mother Earth.
Son of Earth — Flesh on Bone
The entire film is what those names do to each other and to the earth.
God Killing Himself tears open his body and dies. Mother Earth rises from what remains and takes his seed into herself. She gives birth to Son of Earth — Flesh on Bone. He is cast into a barren world, seized by the Nomads, tortured, killed, and briefly returned to life by his mother. The Nomads destroy her too. The Robed Figures gather what remains of mother and son, grind their bodies down, and return them to the soil. The ground flowers.
Begotten was shot in black and white on 16mm reversal film, then rephotographed frame by frame through neutral-density filters. The process took four years and roughly ten hours of work for every finished minute. The image was worked by hand through repeated exposure and filtration until the grain itself began to move like an atmospheric condition, thickening the dark and tearing open the light.
When the film first began circulating, no one agreed on where it belonged. Drama. Horror. Foreign. In one San Francisco video store, briefly, pornography. Susan Sontag encountered the film through the festival circuit, became one of its earliest and most important advocates and began showing it to people in her living room.
For more than thirty-five years, Begotten circulated in versions that carried its force but not its complete photographic body. Now, for the first time, the sketch has become the painting. Nothing has been cleaned up or modernized. The image has simply arrived at the form it was always meant to possess: blacks with weight, whites with force, and grain breathing as atmosphere.
Nobody has settled on what to call Begotten since it first appeared.
That was never the problem.
It is the reason to see it now.
– E. Elias Merhige, July 2026
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