Begotten (1991) 4K Restoration
Director: E. Elias Merhige Run Time: 72 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 1991
Starring: Brian Salzburg, Donna Dempsey, Stephen Charles Barry
Country: United States
Language: English intertitles
About the film:
The violent death of God, and the rebirth of nature in a barren world. When it debuted in 1989, E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten fascinated and shocked those who witnessed it. Never before had the screen depicted such a primal, existential drama, and it became one of the must-see films of the 1990s. The intervening decades have not diminished the power of this unique motion picture experience.
“A spectacular one-of-a-kind… each image is a seductive mystery, a Rorschach test for the adventurous eye.”
—Richard Corliss for Time Magazine
Shot on 16mm and rephotographed frame by frame over four years, Begotten (1991) transforms bodies, landscape, darkness, light and grain into a physical world with its own laws. This new restoration presents the film in the complete photographic form it was always meant to possess.
About the filmmaker:
E. Elias Merhige is a filmmaker whose career has moved from radical independent cinema to Academy Award-nominated international production without surrendering the singularity of his vision. In the mid-1980s he founded Theatreofmaterial in New York. From that company came Begotten (1991), photographed on black-and-white 16mm and rephotographed frame by frame over four years. After struggling to find conventional distribution, the film found an early advocate in Susan Sontag, who screened it privately and helped carry it into international film circles.
Merhige’s second feature, Shadow of the Vampire (2000), starred John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe and received two Academy Award nominations, including Dafoe for Best Supporting Actor. Dafoe’s performance also won the Independent Spirit Award and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association prize. Merhige then directed and produced Suspect Zero (2004) with Cruise/Wagner Productions, founded by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner. He later extended the world begun in Begotten through the short films Din of Celestial Birds (2006) and Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022), completing a cycle more than three decades in the making.
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