The title evokes the Old Testament and the tracing of man's lineage back to Adam and Eve-the Biblical original man and woman. Similarly, the extraordinary images of Edmund Elias Merhige's experimental film have been repeatedly rephotographed and are generations away from the original scenes (film begotten from film). They flicker hallucinatorily, decomposing and recomposing into disturbing primal scenes-God's death, mother and son, victims and aggressors. The surreal, shadowy images of light and darkness, black and white, are accompanied by an evocative sound track but without dialogue. Instead, we must decipher the language, as we are in the territory of the psyche, an unknown begotten of man, not God. Using barren landscapes and rag-clothed figures, Merhige and the THEATREOFMATERIAL evoke a time that is both pre- and post-civilization. In the dreamlike narrative, we follow Mother Earth and her child, "flesh without bone," through a series of physically, often sexually violent encounters in which people act from impulses, without the mediation of language, seemingly without rules. But with the destruction is also regeneration. The film's chronicle is cyclical, tracing birth, death and rebirth in a manner which seems to speak equally of historical and personal processes. --Kathy Geritz The director writes, "Performance, painting and language are inadequate in their ability to capture the shadow cast by the subterranean sun whose light shines past the deepest darkness in all of us...Beneath the eraseable images of your mother, your father, and your God, there is only the tribal, the indelible and ageless. These images are in all of us..these images are begotten."