A true cult classic and an underground cinema landmark championed by the likes of Susan Sontag and Amos Vogel, E. Elias Merhige’s 1989 experimental feature Begotten has now received a new 4K restoration. Following the premiere of the restoration at the Telluride Film Festival last weekend, Kino Lorber will release the film beginning at NYC’s IFC Center on October 2 with the director in person on October 1 for a sneak preview. Ahead of the rollout, we’re thrilled to debut the new trailer.
Here’s the synopsis: “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 through neutral density filtrations until the grain itself began to move like an atmospheric condition, thickening the dark and tearing open the light.
Begotten was restored in 4K from the original 16mm negative and optical soundtrack. Scanning, restoration, and final grading were completed at Filmscan & more in Munich, Germany, under the supervision of filmmaker E. Elias Merhige.
The great Amos Vogel called it “a hallucinatory masterpiece,” saying it’s “obsessional, nightmarish, flamboyantly unsettling, it invades our subconscious, dragging —however much we resist—our own primitive fears and unacknowledged desires to the surface.”
See the trailer below:
