Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Uncategorized Cross your legs: Antichrist goes after lowest impulses
Posted by Curt Holman @Curt_Holman on Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 11:00 AM
I can't truly say I enjoyed watching a man nail his penis to a wooden board in the 1997 documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. I can’t even truly say I saw more than brief glimpses before I averted my eyes, as if confronted by a solar eclipse. Nevertheless, the close-up atrocity summed up the obsessions and life experiences of a self-punishing performance artist with a fatal case of cystic fibrosis and a surprisingly tender marriage.
Lars von Trier’s Antichrist eventually reveals how unguarded genitalia hold up against carpentry utensils, but without the justification of Sick’s humanism or thematic clarity. An instantly notorious award-winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Antichrist proves to be an alternately draggy, repellant and opaque cinematic experience, while clearly representing devoted efforts from several master screen artists. Were Antichrist a piece of hackwork, so to speak, it'd be easy to dismiss.
Continue Reading "Antichrist canonizes genital mutilation"
(Photo Courtesy Trust Nordisk ApS/An IFC Films release)
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