Edmund Elias Merhige is a misunderstood director in that the public does not understand his films. David Lynch is comprehensible, and yet ironically, Times magazine praised Merhige’s 1989 film Begotten, saying it “makes Eraserhead seem like Ernest Saves Christmas.” Begotten was judged by its merits of horror rather than its avant-garde nature. The public imagination is misguided with Lynch, and hardly anything comes from Merhige.
In 2022, Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera premiered at the Opera Philadelphia’s Opera-on-Film Festival on September 30, 2022. I was lucky enough to attend an opening night with Merhige and his crew in the audience. After the movie, everyone was invited to dinner, and I got to ask Merhige a few personal questions about his films. Merhige is a private person who refutes any popular opinion about what anyone sees on film. Some have suggested it has something to do with lesbians or homosexuality (far from it). Eugene Thacker thought his films “would allow everything to dissolve – human into the non-human, body into the environment, image into emulsions of gelatin, crystal, and camphor.”1 Begotten alone influenced the noise genre of “Power electronics” and gave a voice to the “aesthetics of violence.”
But Merhige personally told me a story about cave art (to paraphrase),
“When you see the array of hands in Argentina, they were trying to communicate something together. It won’t make sense the first time. Although we feel a sense of anxiety in that medium beyond words. That is something film can be beyond the novel.”
This idea is clearly expressed in his 2006 film Din of Celestial Birds. If the act of creation could be expressed without words, what would it look like? When you project the film on the wall without any context or sound, what could be heard? Merhige works with black and white film to signify origin and that the artifact we are watching isn’t theater at all but a piece of a film from a different universe.
His mainstream film Shadow of the Vampire is a story about how we can’t trust film. The original Nosferatu in 1922 was made with real footage, and Count Orlok is not Max Schreck “acting” a fictional role. All of it is potentially real without the historical backdrop. In Merhige’s interpretation, Max Schreck is a real vampire, and the darkest conspiracy of all was believing that Nosferatu was a harmless picture play. We start to learn that the origin of film is more powerful than the imagination we bring with us.
Polia & Blastema is that 40-minute head spin. There is no plot, no actors, or no traditional devices found in theater. It’s pure collage art. The type of art film in the tradition of Stan Brakhage where colors and hand-painted imagery are confused between dancers in costumes and CGI that mocks the monsters of H.P. Lovecraft. The soundtrack is hypnotic and eerie. While not as gruesome as Begotten, Polia & Blastema hits the audience and gravitates you towards an inward meditation of anxiety. Once the film stops, you wake up from a nightmare. Humanity does not exist in this work of art. Merhige has created something of an anti-film.
It’s hard to explain what I saw. I love a film that does not follow the cliche of what it’s supposed to do. In the same way, I love a “novel” that tries to be anything but it. You can’t dance while you see Merzbow perform live. But you can rock your head and thrash as if it were metal. Watching Polia & Blastema makes me feel the film is attacking me. There is no denying that a majority of Merhige fans come from industrial and noise music backgrounds. While Merhige denies this influence, the catering towards Eugene Thacker’s trendy pessimism of a “world without us” makes me think otherwise.
The academic talk of a problematic “Anthropocene” is concerning. Philosophers like Timothy Morton believe that the age of humanity is problematic in that we should respect the rights of “non-humankind” and erase ourselves for a transhumanist future. Thacker talking about a “world without us” also implies that humanity is evil, that we have to get rid of “human supremacy” like it’s “white supremacy.” I wish I were making this up, but this is casual talk among late Gen-X American philosophers.
All this talk of negativity, guilt, and shame does not advocate an enlightened way of living but promotes the kind of shallow and pretentious self-destructive punk rock attitude of the noise musician and his urge to hate without reason. They soon latch onto the work of Merhige and justify the violent imagery as a reason behind their subculture. I get the moody appeal of Philip Best and his publishing house “Amphetamine Sulphate.” Yet this is a far cry from industrial music and its aesthetics of a bygone era. This popularity contest that Xerox “zines” of serial killers and pornography show us some kind of truth is absurd. I can see how Merhige plays a tightrope balancing act between this audience and serious connoisseurs who enjoy the film as art.
I talked with some of Merhige’s crew about concerns for Thacker’s irrational antinatalism. They seemed confused about what I was addressing, and one said I should “say it in his face.” …I would love to! But Thacker did not show up for the opening night. Rather, I talked to a fan from Oakland all the way and talked to him about how Ryan Trecartin seems to be both a fad and an elite smugness and commenter on Y2K culture. He got what I was saying, at least. A composer for Merhige followed me on Twitter and, days later, unfollowed me because of my politically incorrect opinions. I talked to him about Dennis Cooper and how his transgressions of childhood trauma relate to the blackness of Merhige’s film. Of course, not everyone is going to relate to that.
Merhige’s mother was also there. They talked a bit about the failure of Suspect Zero and how the producers wanted the film to be something that wasn’t in his vision. I enjoyed the aesthetics in that film the same way I enjoyed The Blair Witch Project. The horror relies solely on the viewer and what is perceived through a filter. However, suspect Zero makes allusions to the Weimar Republic and Viennese Actionism. The Blair Witch Project is found footage, as is, without any doubt that it’s fake. Both play on film having power over the viewer.
Begotten has influenced a generation of viewers who demand the A24 avant-garde over the normal, but Merhige remains the same. His resume speaks for itself and reaches beyond his first film. Polia & Blastema is a spiritual successor to Begotten, albeit with its pretty moments and drunken movements. Merhige is a hidden treasure in the American avant-garde canon. He made the right choice to focus on future film productions that could illustrate his interest in horror theater. I highly recommend the film, even if it is a pretty galactic slideshow and cosmic pour painting. What is thought-provoking isn’t the horror aspect but the audacity to express pain found in cave paintings. Art is something that moves us as much as we want to move it.
- Thacker, Eugene (2015). “Chapter 3: Meditations on the Gothic”. Tentacles Longer Than Night. Horror of Philosophy. Zero Books.
