Begotten

October 3, 2020

How can an image survive itself? That is to say: what survives of the film stock, of that substance made of fat and flesh? Convulsing, mutating: the image is molded from mineral remains older than time itself. Formed from the dust of the earth, like flesh. Consuming itself. “Like a flame burning through the darkness.”

The image in Begotten is a wound that is difficult to see. Every scene, every frame, is a strange wound in whatever it might wish to represent. Every scene is an opening, the inauguration of an open wound in reality. A mutation in the body’s reality.

(The following text is the result of a series of cuts and rearrangements I made from an interview that Elias E. Merhige, the film’s supposed “director,” gave to the website HorrorNews^[1])

Very little is known about the origin, recording process, and manufacture of the “film.”

Originally mistaken for a parchment scroll, it was discovered during excavations in a catacomb south of what is now Iraq—the ancient region of Sumer, one of the oldest and most important civilizations on Earth. It was the Sumerians who invented the West’s greatest technology: writing. Today we know that they may equally be credited with inventing the virus of the recorded image—the motion picture. Among everything recovered during the excavation, nothing especially remarkable could be said about the wrapping that contained the artifact, except that it held a curious collection of dark, metallic scrolls and a stone inscribed with cuneiform writing. The stone is estimated to have been carved around 3000 BCE; the “parchment,” however, refused to be dated by any method known to science. Indeed, according to some of the world’s most respected archaeological institutions (including the International Association of Archaeology), its chemical composition^[2] suggests that it may not even be of terrestrial origin, or that it emerged at an extraordinarily remote stage in the geological formation of the Earth—long before anything that could be measured through carbon dating. It would perhaps not be an exaggeration to claim that it came into existence before time itself, as we know it.

Elias E. Merhige, the film’s “director,” recounts that while conducting experiments with his experimental theater and cinema company in New York during the mid- 1980s, he was contacted by a friend, Dr. Susan Gatnos, an archaeologist and specialist in Sumerian artifacts. According to Merhige, a passage from an email she sent him read:

”…a rather peculiar kind of papyrus, dark and metallic in appearance, composed not of rice fibers or animal skin, as one would expect, but—according to laboratory analysis—of a kind of cellulose triacetate, which, unless I’m mistaken, is the very same material used in photographic film. There is one astonishing difference, however: its molecular structure is based not on carbon, but on silicon… Without question, something entirely unprecedented in archaeology. I should also add that alongside it we found an equally extraordinary stone bearing cuneiform inscriptions unlike anything I have ever seen.”

Merhige notes that the email concluded with an urgent request that they meet as soon as possible. Dr. Gatnos did not know how much longer she would be allowed to keep the discovery in her possession, since the NYMSA (New York Museum of Sumerian Artifacts) had granted her only temporary custody of the objects so they could be examined as quickly as possible. For this reason she asked him to maintain absolute discretion: the slightest public exposure could jeopardize both her research and the museum’s handling of the discovery.

Indeed, it would be only seventeen years after the events I am about to recount that Merhige finally agreed to speak publicly about his greatest “work.” At the time, Merhige was something of a specialist in experimental cinema and photographic film. Eager to honor his friend’s request—and long fascinated by the oddities and forgotten curiosities of early cinema—he arranged to meet her as quickly as possible. Their meeting confirmed Dr. Gatnos’s suspicions: the strange dark scroll bore an uncanny resemblance to motion-picture film. Naturally, it was in a decrepit state, wound into dense coils that were almost impossible to unravel after so many centuries in storage. Even so, it remained surprisingly pliable, resisting disintegration into dust—a remarkable quality considering its age, or rather, the impossibility of assigning it any age at all, as Dr. Gatnos would later explain to Merhige.

They were therefore able to unroll the parchment and expose its contents without the excessive precautions archaeologists normally reserve for objects of extreme rarity. Externally, it was opaque, dark, and metallic. Inside, however, it possessed a silver, gelatinous sheen remarkably similar to that of black-and-white 120 mm photographic film.

The resemblance was so striking that, for a moment, Merhige tried to persuade his friend to allow him to subject the scroll to some form of chemical developing process. With his background in experimental cinema, he boasted that no kind of film stock had ever existed that he could not develop. There was, however, an obvious obstacle. The rarity and antiquity of the object made it impossible to remove even the smallest fragment for testing. Their attention therefore shifted to the second artifact recovered with it: the stone bearing the cuneiform inscription. They hoped it might reveal something about the mysterious metallic scroll—and perhaps about the origin of both objects altogether.

The “Stele,” as Dr. Gatnos came to call it, was no less astonishing than the “film.” Its inscriptions had been engraved with a precision unlike anything the archaeologist had ever encountered. Stranger still, the text combined Sumerian characters from historically distinct periods. Such a mixture suggested that the inscription had been recopied over at least eight or ten generations, spanning roughly five centuries. Gatnos, however, found this conclusion absurd, for there was no detectable variation whatsoever in the handwriting from one cuneiform sign to the next. In her view, every character seemed to have been carved by the very same hand.

Nevertheless, she began translating the inscription. Although she was then regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on Sumerian cuneiform, she encountered extraordinary difficulties. Merhige recalls that their meetings gradually became weekly rituals, lasting no less than two months, during which he assisted her in the work of translation. Throughout this period, she always appeared exhausted—as though haunted by a profound lack of sleep. According to Merhige, from the moment she undertook the translation, his friend seemed to grow steadily weaker, as though the object itself were somehow “draining her life away.” A woman who had once radiated vitality gradually became pale, detached, increasingly indifferent to the body she inhabited—yet never once complained. Today, Merhige suspects she may not even have realized the state she was in.

Of their final meetings, he recalls something especially disturbing: she had become utterly indifferent to her own physiological needs. They would spend entire days bent over the translation, and she would not rise a single time—not to eat, not to drink, not even to use the bathroom. She would arrive at Merhige’s studio early in the morning and make no significant movement until leaving late at night.

During their final five meetings, Merhige says, she developed an uncontrollable obsession with deciphering the Stele. While he sat beside her tirelessly recording every possible result she produced, she would mutter only a few inaudible words to herself, her gaze fixed upon the growing pile of books before her, impossible to distract. Calling her name accomplished nothing. Her entire being seemed consumed by the act of translation. It was during the last of these meetings that Merhige became convinced something profoundly strange was happening.

As usual, she arrived at his studio early in the morning. That day, however, she appeared particularly haggard, like someone who had not slept for days. Yet the true horror began only when she opened her mouth: she no longer spoke any language Merhige recognized. Indeed, it seemed to him that she spoke no language known to anyone at all.

Merhige says that seeing her hunched over that mountain of papers and books remains one of the most terrifying images of madness he has ever witnessed. At first he chose not to intervene. He knew his friend to be deeply private, and she was renowned within the academic community for her obsessive dedication to research. He assumed that perhaps this was merely some radical method she had devised to overcome the difficulties of translation.

But as the day wore on, the situation worsened.

Finally, he contacted her husband. When he arrived at the studio, the two men had to carry her bodily to the car. Terrified, Gatnos’s husband confessed that he had long feared his wife was approaching a mental collapse. No matter how hard he tried to pull her away from her work, she always found some compulsive way to return to it. It was almost as though she no longer possessed a will of her own. During the previous three days, she had not returned home once, spending every hour inside the room assigned to her at the museum. That final meeting marked a rupture in their relationship that lasted, Merhige recalls, roughly four months. During that period he learned, through an official statement issued by the museum where Gatnos worked, that she had supposedly contracted an illness during the excavations in which the artifacts had been discovered—a diagnosis that ostensibly explained her increasingly disturbing behavior.

Only at the end of those four months did Gatnos send Merhige an email containing her translation of the Stele—a document that the director later reproduced in full in his interview with HorrorNews. What follows is a free translation of that text.

Dear Merhige,

Forgive me for not having contacted you these past few months… They have been difficult days. As I believe you have already heard, I contracted a rare virus transmitted by a small desert tick during the expedition I undertook six months ago—the very expedition in which my team and I discovered the artifacts. I want you to know, however, that everything is all right, and that I am already well on the road to recovery.

Thank you for all the support you have given me. I know I have been absent these past four months, despite your repeated attempts to reach me. But I believe I did what was best. I must ask you, please, not to disregard my request that we keep our distance—for quite some time, at least—from anything concerning the contents of the Stele or the parchment. I do not believe these things were ever meant to enter human consciousness. As soon as I finished translating the Stele, I turned it over to the museum authorities responsible for its custody. The truth, however, is that I feel I should have destroyed it, erased every trace of this research. I would advise you to do the same. For me, though, it is already too late. I no longer wish to have any contact whatsoever with that object—or with anything that may derive from it. There is little more I can tell you, except that I fear for your life, my dear friend.

The translation follows:

Bearers of language, Photographers, Keepers of diaries
You, with your memory, are dead, frozen
Lost within a present that never ceases to pass
Here dwells the incarnation of matter
A language forever.

Like a flame burning through the darkness,
Life is flesh and bone convulsing upon the earth.

Translator’s Note: The noun Photographers is, of course, an anachronism. Yet among all the books and sources I consulted—which, to the best of my knowledge, number well over fifty publications by the foremost specialists in Sumerian language and cuneiform writing—I was unable to find any other term that resembled the concept suggested by the word’s structure in context.

Broken down into its constituent signs, the expression would amount to something like container–capture–light–person–eyes. In ancient Sumerian, derived nouns are generally formed by placing the modifying element at the end of a sequence of nominal particles. The word for goldsmith, for instance—a profession common at the time—is literally written as stone– modified–person, indicating, almost concretely, what a goldsmith actually does.

In the case of this mysterious expression, I could find no other satisfactory interpretation, despite the obvious anachronism. Given the extraordinary mystery surrounding the inscription— and the remarkable technological sophistication of Sumerian culture—it would not surprise me if they possessed some form of camera or similar device capable of capturing objects through light.

Merhige recalls that upon finishing the email he was astonished by the determination with which his friend sought to avoid any further contact involving the artifacts, even at the cost of ending their friendship. To him, there had to be something more behind her behavior.

Indeed, he found it strange that she had vanished so abruptly. He also found it curious that her illness had taken nearly two months to manifest itself. Not that he doubted the museum’s explanation, but the sequence of events struck him as questionable. While they had still been working together, although she visibly showed signs of physical deterioration, she never once abandoned her work on translating the stone. Quite the contrary. As Merhige himself had observed, the more she worked, the more obsessive her pursuit of the message became.

To the director, the relationship between her illness and the inscribed tablet was one of cause and effect.

After reflecting briefly upon the contents of the Stele—which Merhige describes in the interview as profoundly poetic, though elusive and cryptic—the director decided that, given the extraordinary strangeness of the entire affair, it would be wiser to follow Dr. Gatnos’s advice and dispose of what remained.

He returned to the studio where their meetings had taken place and where the rolled fragments of the parchment were still stored.

His intention, he says, was simply to burn the film.

He poured a little alcohol into a metal trash bin, lit it, and picked up the box containing the parchment.

That was when something utterly unforeseen occurred.

As he was about to cast the first fragment into the flames, Merhige noticed that, as it approached the heat and the light, the object began to peel away. Beneath the dark, opaque crust that covered its surface, a series of stark black markings gradually emerged.

The director recalls being dumbfounded. His immediate thought was that the object he and Dr. Gatnos had taken for an ancient parchment could only be a strip of photographic film of unknown origin.

The film was developing there before the fire.

The arrangement of the images across its surface, their sequential order, their framing—even the individual frames themselves—everything was unmistakably present.

“There could be no doubt,” Merhige concludes in the interview. “It was, in fact, a motion picture.”

Immediately, Merhige prepared the remaining fragments of the bizarre film stock to be processed using the editing and projection equipment in his studio. Once the fire-development process had been completed on the rest of the parchment (the director says it took him nearly an entire night to do so), he finally attempted to begin assembling the film.

The fragments of parchment had not been cut into any recognizable format, so Merhige divided them into what he believed to be the most suitable size for editing and projection. By chance, the format that proved closest was 16 mm.

It was while cutting the fragments, however, that Merhige realized he would be faced with a number of problems.

The extremely high contrast of the images, combined with the dark metallic quality of the film stock, prevented the light used by ordinary projectors from passing through it. Even after countless experiments with every machine at his disposal, the director concluded that projecting the images contained within the strange film would require a highly specific combination of light sources, most likely operating at different intensities.

A second obstacle—far more serious than the first—soon became apparent. Once heated, the fragments of parchment hardened, taking on a coarse, granular texture, as though they had become sheets of dark, semi-translucent glass coated in fine sand. This made it impossible to run the film through any editing bench or projection system then available, all of which required film flexible enough to bend like plastic.

Merhige knew that if he truly wished to uncover the contents of the film, he would have to build the necessary machinery himself.

Although he lacked the financial means to commission new equipment—which, at the time, would have been prohibitively expensive—he was confident he would not encounter insurmountable technical difficulties. His training as an experimental filmmaker (he had studied directly under figures such as …) had given him an extensive understanding of the mechanics behind virtually every cinematic device in existence.

“Back then, I could have built a projector from scratch,” the director remarks in the interview, with a hint of pride.

Besides, by the late 1980s Merhige was already well connected within New York’s independent film scene. He knew the strange people, improvised workshops,

obsolete machinery, and forgotten curiosities that circulated through the city’s cinematic underground.

It did not take long for him to gather everything he needed.

“I think it must have taken me three or four months. Back then I knew a lot of people. Sometimes I’d simply walk into shops selling used machinery and ask whether they might spare this part or that one. I’d even bring a list of what I needed, and people would gladly give me whatever they had lying around. Most of it was junk, of course. Even so, it was remarkable—people really can be generous when they want to be. When that didn’t work, I’d take odd jobs here and there until I could afford whatever was missing.”

In the end, Merhige assembled a machine from a 1940s Italian projector and a 1936 Mitchell camera which, with the assistance of an engineer friend, he modified to accommodate the peculiar demands of the “film.”

It was with the help of this same colleague—whose identity Merhige insists on withholding, apparently at the man’s own request—that the director finally began assembling the motion picture.

(The following account, reproduced directly from the interview, consists of Merhige’s own recollections of this period of contact with the film. The name of his colleague has been replaced simply with the letter X.)

“We had no idea what it was.

Sometimes it felt as though we had returned to life’s primordial soup… There was no thought, nothing at all—only that earthly force, that underworld force, chthonic, tentacular beings taking over. At other times we would spend hours simply watching the movement of the film through the machine… the light falling upon that strangely dark, metallic surface… producing those mesmerizing visual deformities… the succession of the frames, each one of them… We had to undertake a painstaking restoration process, frame by frame. They had been terribly worn by the action of time. Naturally, this made our work extraordinarily difficult, and I would estimate that we recovered no more than one-fifth of the original material.

Our sense of time was completely altered throughout the entire process. We could no longer distinguish day from night, nor hours from minutes and seconds. It was as though we inhabited a moment of a-representationality, of a-significance, as I would later come to describe it. The film itself had convulsed certain structures of reality that we had always considered fundamental. It was then that the words engraved upon the Stele began to make perfect sense.

I felt as though that message had been addressed directly to me… To those who attempt to capture time by representing it. There before us was an atemporal, a- representational mode of conceiving reality.

It was as though something were trying to breathe life into the film… We probably spent more than ten hours on every single frame—or what seemed to us to be ten hours. During those endless hours it became possible to perceive a very strange kind of light, a kind of light without light, which served as the background against which all those objects, all those things, mutilated and destroyed one another. Little by little, X and I began to lose our minds. It was, without question, a hallucinatory state.

It was extraordinary. As we later came to speculate, it was almost as though the film were not merely the representation of something that had already happened… It was as though the film itself—the image itself—was reality.

The film was reality.

Flesh upon Bone.

From there it did not take us long to conclude that what we were witnessing might well have been the very moment in which flesh first came into being upon the earth.

Naturally, we were far removed from lucidity. There was something terrible about those images. Watching them emerge directly from the film was like falling under some ancient spell. Yet it was more than that. It seemed that the images were speaking to something profoundly primitive within each of us. It was as though we were truly travelling backward through time—or rather, shattering time’s barriers altogether—becoming those beings born of the earth: crawling, cellular creatures, as though we ourselves had become the Earth’s integument.

I remember that after one particularly long period of editing—we sometimes remained locked inside for three, four, even six days at a time, utterly captivated by the images, scarcely leaving except to satisfy the most basic needs, to eat or take a shit… Only afterward did I remember what had happened to Dr. Gatnos—we lost, for roughly forty-eight hours, the ability to communicate verbally with the outside world.

I remember very little of those two days.

But I vividly remember flashes in which my companion and I were crawling across the floor, convulsing… as though we were embryos… beings still in the process of formation. It was as though we had undergone an actual bodily mutation. I would not describe it as regression, nor as de-evolution, but rather as coming into contact with the millennia-old genes that still inhabit the human body—the ones that connect us to the bacteria that move across the earth, for example.

I believe that, once those forty-eight hours had passed, we had been born again, generated by a new consciousness.”*

Merhige’s astonishing account has never, in fact, been experienced by anyone other than himself, his colleague, and, supposedly, his archaeologist friend, Dr. Gatnos.

According to the director, the process of transferring the papyrus onto photographic film completely destroyed the original artifact. And, as Merhige himself remarks, “to humanity’s relief,” the recorded copy of the papyrus does not possess the same spell as the projection of the original parchment—although there have been a number of reported cases of viewers entering a hallucinatory state shortly after watching Begotten, one closely resembling a severe fever. Those affected frequently claim that they are “becoming part of the earth.”

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