Snuff, Exploitation, Mondo, Gore, Gross Out: Synopsises

Here is a database dedicated to itemizing the dramatic minutiae in which the antichrist tendencies of modern film-making find their anecdotal grounding. The obliteration of the body stands in thematically for where once there were trials of the soul.

Obviously, this is genre film, meant for very specific connoisseurs. Still, the plainest way to describe a theological (-ish)--non-specialized--interest in this queasy and unpleasant material is to make the case, as in hardcore pornography, that the struggles of the soul, for us moderns, needs a physical correspondence. Gore describes suffering.

Particularly useful if one has not the heart to see all these masterpieces of splenetic auteurs, but for some perverse reason must still bear witness.

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Oedepis Rex

Oedepis Rex by Sophocles.

Original 1937 Time review for Cocteau's adaption (including set descriptions, etc.).

Christian Bérard, Oedipus and the Sphinx, 1932
Mural for Jean Cocteau’s flat, Paris

This play is perhaps the hardest-to-look at, harshest, eeriest dramatizations of Fate as well as one of the clearest articulations of it and the earliest. One looks into crime and the despair of the world, and through the maze of accusations, despair, evidence and hunches, at the end of the journey, one finds oneself. In this, the plot is almost dream-like.

For Freud, this play is the statement of the primal taboo and its punishment: a man kills his father to bed his mother. In how Sophocles describes fate we see, also, something like what for Freud would become the unconscious: this terrible crime is committed while hidden from Oedipus' (the perpetrator's) concious knowledge. And yet one can read Freud through Sophocles as well: one looks too hard at Freud's theory, and one sees only Freud. The theory dies and withers away.

Unlike in Freud, Sophocles' Fate is also a trap of external riddles and prophecies. Everything is laid bare in advance. The struggle to cheat Fate's inexorable bureaucracy is often the fulfillment of its miseries. What we call plot, though in meticulous evidence here as each move by Oedipus furthers the revelation of his guilt, leading to his ultimate punishment, is less to uncover what is true, but to be drowned in truth, destroyed by it. The tendrils of fate and plot affix to Oedipus like strands of quicksand to a drowning man. One does not, with knowledge, cheat death.

Greek drama keeps close to a religious, ceremonial practice. One senses in the elevated, poetic invocations and liturgical recitations of the chorus that this crime is ritualistically reenacted to address similar, uncanny signs of doom in the present. In this, the fate of Oedipus also resembles agrarian ceremonies where the fertility god is ritually sacrificed to appease the dying fields.

Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom

In full.

The Golden Bough

The Golden Bough, A study of magic and religion by Sir James George Frazer.

While seriously out of date in its anthropological bedside (note: the high condescension towards the cultures it looks at, quotes and samples mostly taken at third hand), inclusion of no doubt spurious facts taken from *first hand testimonials* of colonialist adventurers and profiteers, the basic hypothesis I still find interesting. That most religious ritual is rooted in the historical practice of magic. And at base of all magic is agrarian ceremonies for a fertility god who dies yearly, rises again.

Human Sacrifice in Legends and Myths

This is a collection of folklore dedicated to the subject, via the good offices of folktexts.

The Cruel Practice of Art

For those interested in the the figure of artist as rooted in the magical ritual of self-annihilation, here is a pivotal text. George Bataille's The Cruel Practice of Art.

From the George Bataille elibrary.