Begotten (1990)

No dialogue, only two opening intertitles. A figure called God Killing Himself disembowels himself on camera; Mother Earth emerges, impregnates herself with his remains, and bears a ruined son, Flesh on Bone. Nomads torture and kill them both; robed figures harvest the bodies into clay vessels and bury them. Flowers rise from the ground and the cycle starts again.

⭐⭐ MERHIGE CALLS THE FILMMAKING ITSELF "ALCHEMICAL" — he built his own optical printer from salvaged parts because he could not afford one, and spent eight to ten hours of photochemical reprocessing per minute of footage chasing the look of, in his words, "a cinematic Dead Sea Scroll that had been buried in the sands." ⚠ His own vocabulary for the myth is Gnostic, Hermetic and Egyptian — the son is named for the "Begotten One" of Gnostic cosmology, and the disembowelled god echoes Osiris, torn apart so Isis can gather him — never Lurianic; Susan Sontag, who championed the film into distribution, called it "a metaphysical splatter film" and ranked it among the ten most important of modern times.