You With Your Memory Are Dead

When Mr. Shipley first shared with me his desire, to lock himself in a room with nothing but Begotten playing in a loop cycle, watching its images over and over again for two weeks, isolating himself from any outside influence, taking no interruption or break except to sleep, it seemed like a recipe from the writers of the old testament prophets manipulating and isolating all sense so they may unfettered by the noise of the everyday unearth their experience of the divine; Gary’s approach to making Begotten his own in a ritual of creative-conscious engagement is a decision to no longer passively “watch” Begotten but to enact and digest within his own being a ritual which would remake the film inside his very temple of earth, his body. I always secretly hoped Begotten to be more than a movie, to be in fact an initiation for those willing to go that far. So I can only admire Gary for finding the necessary map to what makes this film belong only to those willing to unlock it. –E. Elias Merhige