#allucinations

Don't Starve Together: From Beyond - Forgone [Story Trailer]

Love me some flashback. And a flashforward to a new boss...?

CLEAN, SHAVEN [1993, LODGE KERRIGAN]

[…] Which is not to say that the film lacks a point of view. If anything, the political dimension of Kerrigan's movies is unmissable. He insists on showing people we'd rather not think about, in places we'd rather not see, the forgotten backwaters and industrialized gray zones of present-day, minimum-wage America. His films withhold information about their characters only to draw us closer to them—what we're not told is a cue to fill in what we think we know, which, as often as not, exists to be overturned. The upshot is that there's less distance between us and these life-bruised individuals than we'd first assumed. Kerrigan is above all a humanist, and if his films are about any one thing, it's not so much mental instability as the precariousness of sanity in the pitiless, brutalizing modern world. […]

[…] In The Politics of Experience, the Scottish writer and psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who advocated therapeutic communities instead of conventional treatment and hospitalization for so-called schizophrenics, reconsiders the etymology of the term, coined by Eugen Bleuler in 1908, from the Greek roots schizo and phrenos, and generally translated as "shattered mind." But Laing offers an alternate definition of phrenos: "soul" or "heart." "The schizophrenic in this sense is one who is brokenhearted," he writes, "and even broken hearts have been known to mend, if we have the heart to let them." To Lodge Kerrigan's great credit, Clean, Shaven is a film that shares this philosophy. […]

CLEAN, SHAVEN [1993, LODGE KERRIGAN]

[…] Lodge Kerrigan's movies are so often termed "uncompromising" and "unrelenting" that it's worth pondering what exactly lies behind their steadfast refusal to let up. The salient quality of these spare, intense films is that they deny the viewer the comfort of distance. Kerrigan demolishes the notion that movies are not suited to expressing inner life. He forces you to share skull space with characters most films would never think to look at, let alone so intimately. Getting close, often upsettingly so, to his lost souls and margin dwellers, he is undaunted by their opacity and failing grip on sanity, not to mention unencumbered by social judgments of any sort. In the course of three features, all as steel nerved in execution as they are rigorous in conception, this singular American independent has developed what might be the most literal and harrowing form of empathy in modern movies. […]

[…] Of the films that have tried to evoke or arrive at an understanding of insanity, from the inside or outside, using the first or third person, none have done so with Clean, Shaven's remarkable alchemy of clinical detail and raw poetry. The abrasive, subjective sound design, the visual abstractions, and the nerve-jangling ellipses all inch the movie toward the realm of experimental film—which is only fitting, given that the condition in question is characterized by discontinuity, the erosion of boundaries, and the failure of narrative. Kerrigan does not in any way venture that his protagonist has a beautiful mind—this is as unsentimental a depiction of mental illness as you'll find in movies—but the film has a frayed, terse lyricism all the same. […]

[…] Which is not to say that the film lacks a point of view. If anything, the political dimension of Kerrigan's movies is unmissable. He insists on showing people we'd rather not think about, in places we'd rather not see, the forgotten backwaters and industrialized gray zones of present-day, minimum-wage America. His films withhold information about their characters only to draw us closer to them—what we're not told is a cue to fill in what we think we know, which, as often as not, exists to be overturned. The upshot is that there's less distance between us and these life-bruised individuals than we'd first assumed. Kerrigan is above all a humanist, and if his films are about any one thing, it's not so much mental instability as the precariousness of sanity in the pitiless, brutalizing modern world. […]

[…] In The Politics of Experience, the Scottish writer and psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who advocated therapeutic communities instead of conventional treatment and hospitalization for so-called schizophrenics, reconsiders the etymology of the term, coined by Eugen Bleuler in 1908, from the Greek roots schizo and phrenos, and generally translated as "shattered mind." But Laing offers an alternate definition of phrenos: "soul" or "heart." "The schizophrenic in this sense is one who is brokenhearted," he writes, "and even broken hearts have been known to mend, if we have the heart to let them." To Lodge Kerrigan's great credit, Clean, Shaven is a film that shares this philosophy. […]

impeccable analysis by Dennis Lim