kagablog

ten monologues from the lives of the serial killers (photo mies rogmans)

Scumbag Super Everything
Ian Kerkhof dissected by Dee Rimbaud

I happily caught up with Ian, after he sent me a copy of his latest film which is a 25 minute reflection on the work and wisdom of California-based veteran performance artist Ron Athey. I knew Athey’s work from his harrowing autobiographical piece Four scenes of a Harsh Life one of which The Human Printing caused the battle between Senator Jesse Helms and the MEA, (who had sponsored him) because of the fact that Ron is HIV positive and he had cut a fellow performer on stage and there was a question of blood mixing and other shit as “blood-letting” is very much part of Ron’s act. I don’t want to banalise either the film or Ron’s performance here as I have reviewed both in more depth on page 47 of this issue. However, receiving the Athey video made me sit up and remember the cosmic nights I’d spent over the years watching Ian’s films. Even Ian himself, thinks I must be the only person on the planet to sit through The Mozart Bird twice.
In fact I loved the story and action for all its weirdness, destructiveness, depravity, morbid sexuality, crass dialogues, even if the acting sometimes needed to be turned up a notch or two, it was provocative and an interesting supra-real reflection on an Amsterdam brain-, heart- and genital-fucked relationship.

Ian was born in South Africa in March 1964. He read Political Science at the University of Natal, Durban and left the country as a conscientious objector at the age of nineteen. He received political asylum in the Netherlands in 1984 and worked at the Dutch anti-Apartheid Movement and the Committee on South African War Resistance until 1986. From 1986 to 1988 he was a programme maker for the Amsterdam pirate radio station 100. He enrolled in the Dutch Film and Television Academy in 1990 and within a short period he had written, directed and produced some ten short films. His first feature length production Kyodai Makes the Big Time was shot in 14 days during the summer vacation period after the first year at the academy.
Since then Ian has produced some great award-winning stuff. Using Super 8, 16mm, 35mm and video his work is always harrowing and infectious, depicting his own brand of celluloid sin. Predominantly, edgy, alternative / underground and often transgressive, it has none of the ritualised gore often associated with this genre of film-makers, preferring to seduce his audience by pressing social alarm bells, by using expose-style images and sound architecture that underpins the ugliest, psychotic nature of varying human conditions and situations at the end of the twentieth century. He often mixes documentary footage with the fictional sections in order to intensify the shock and authenticate the reality.

Two such feature films Nice to Meet you, Please Don’t Rape Me (1995) and Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers (1994) aptly demonstrate this style. The former is described as the world’s first rape musical. It deals with a morbid trinity, made up of a black man, an Afrikaner and an Englishman who make a descent into hell and meet up with the obsessional world of the film maker, who explores the ins and outs of a society still sick within itself with apartheid. South Africa is exposed in its ugliest, most shameful feature: female rape. This ubiquitous parable takes on all forms: political, sexual, verbal, moral, psychological. The musical theme for the title of the film is hummed incessantly throughout the film, only interrupted by the action and a torrent of obscenities. Paradoxically, the film is a hymn to love. Raping in order to die, forgiving in order to love, living in order to be born again. It is a harsh, jarring, caustic film about the absurdity of a society in which the only genuine victory today over apartheid is the fact that a black or white woman is raped every 83 seconds. The film is brutal, but at times disturbingly, satirically funny. Unusual musical form is used to juxtapose the themes and particularly the ostensibly separate worlds of politics and sexuality. The resulting hybrid is terrifying and unconventional.

The structure of Ten Monologues from the Lives of Serial killers is literally that of its title: ten monologues adapted from various fiction and documentary sources which combine to produce an unsettling work that does not pretend to analyse or understand the serial killers. The scripts were developed by Ian from original sources by Charles Manson, J.G. Ballard, Roberta Lannes and Henry Rollins.

The central theme of this film about serial killers is motivelessness. A film organised around an individual protagonist would have invariably led to specific psychological reasoning and our obsession with motivation. Ian deliberately avoided such conflicts, in order to dramatise the phenomenon of the serial killer in the context of an end-of-the-millennium syndrome. The serial killers are not just portrayed as sick individuals, but a reflection of the end of the Judea-Christian epoch. They are the last folk heroes in a rapidly vanishing teleology: the myth of purpose. Their motivelessness fascinates us. It mirrors the ever diminishing faith in the grand narratives of politics, religion and philosophy. By dislocating sound and image from their original context, the taken for granted assumptions that govern our experience of the real are undermined and subverted in order to bring the audience closer to the experience of rupture. The serial killers embody this rupture.

In addition to his feature films, Ian Kerkhof directs and produces numerous short films, including documentaries on artists, performers, personalities that are critical to contemporary cultural evolution. This has included work on Stelarc, Masami Akita (Merzbow, see article on the New Japanese Psychedelic in this issue), Scanner, Ginsburg and the techno scene, and he is just off to Germany to work with Blixa Bargeld of Nick Cave / Einsturzende Neubauten.

In a relatively short time Ian Kerkhof has made a significant contribution to contemporary Dutch cinematography, by showing a fearless disregard for the conventional, boring, even unsuccessful norms and adding a fresh dynamic and vision to the study of social depravation.

this article originally appeared in fringecore 2