by Henk Oosterling
Even a film enthusiast inured to Ian Kerkhof’s recalcitrant and somewhat ‘perverse’ cinematic work, cannot escape the overwhelming physical impact of the opening scenes of The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man. Although an involuntary revulsion towards these images may spring from aesthetic rather than moral objections, there are few who will not find it horrid on both counts. The infernal character of the ‘love scene’ provides no safe aesthetic distance from which to inspect the robust romancing shown on the screen. Maybe this is also the reason why, unnoticed and almost in spite of ourselves, we are happy to participate in the lovers’ choking, yet liberating, laughter. While they, in and through their laughter, are able to escape the dreadful spell of their orgasmic intimacy, transforming it into comradely tenderness, we, the viewers, are provided with a temporary respite in which to regain our senses. It would seem that only such pained and painful laughter, can offer a release from the excesses appearing on the screen.
But what kind of laughter are we dealing with here? It obviously has nothing in common with that giggling playfulness which eroticism tends to induce in some spectators. Instead of harmonious, sensory communication, we seem here to be dealing with a spell, in other words a conjuring up and a ritualization or stylization of orgasmic violence, which oddly enough has the power not only to repel but also to fascinate. As if standing on the brink of a precipice, we cannot help casting a trembling glance into the violent darkness. So what matters in this scene is not so much the sex itself, but the overwhelming sensation of breaking through boundaries of violence, in order to achieve - if such a loaded word may be permitted - ecstatic rather than harmonious communion.
1. The Deadman: living death
jaap hoogstra as the dead man
Seen from this perspective the images which follow seem to gain in coherence and meaning. The main character in the film is an old man. He is old enough to have seen, if not everything, certainly a great deal. He is the ‘deadman’. But the ‘deadman’, in spite of the intended kitschy reference to the horror genre, is not a zombie, not an ‘undead’. The old man is the ‘deadman’ because he is able to confront death in life. The subject of the film is not death after, but during one’s life; a phenomenon which is usually perceived as decay. The absolute boundary of our existence, death, can only be experienced in the trembling and shuddering of individuals’ voluntarily crossing of the boundaries of excessive violence in their attempt to achieve union. If Ian Kerkhof’s film is about anything, if it has a subject at all, then it is this liminal experience.
The deadman’s expression betrays no more emotion than that of a zombie. Any trace of feeling which could be divined on that calcified, world-encompassing face, would lie somewhere between disbelief and awe. And, just as while witnessing the opening love-scene we are ricocheted between repulsion and fascination, so too, in the final scene, the deadman is both drawn to and repelled by the massive woman at the bar, who shamelessly lifts her skirts, exposes her sex, and — after subsequently undergoing a metamorphosis and changing before his very eyes into his beloved — ends up by urinating onto the deadmans’ face.
The opening scene with its ‘realistic’ excess lends an enormous tension to the last scene: not simply because it remains unclear whether the act is fake or ‘real’, but because there is no laughter to release us from the spell. Perhaps the function of the first scene, with its ‘clinical’ registration of what crosses an unthinkable boundary, is literally to dislocate the spectators, to push them over the edge of their safe voyeurism and open them up to the base experience of cinematograph exposure.
The subject of the film is not an autonomous individual, but the tension between the unbridled forces between which the individual attempts to find meaning and direction in life. These elemental forces, to which the individual is constantly exposed, are literally present in the film: fire, wind, water and earth, if I may take the philosophical liberty of interpreting the last element as material in general and excessive physicality in particular. In short, it is not the individual’s psychologically transparent thoughts and motives which comprise the subject of Kerkhof’s filmic impression The Return of the Deadman, but an impossible losing of the self, a delivering over of the self to inescapable creative and destructive forces.
Events take place. The deadman ends up in a bar, where an unknown woman standing on the counter lifts up her skirts and exposes her sex to him. Earth. Her blasphemous exclamation ‘I am God’ is drowned in the crackling and burning of a stake which turns without transition into the sea of fire which consumed the leaders of the religious fanatic sect in Waco. Fire. The fiery furnace transports us back to the metamorphosed woman’s genitalia releasing a powerful stream of urine over the deadman. Earth turns discontinuously into water: background noise of breaking waves, thundering surf. But what we ‘really’ see is a solarized image of the sun which suddenly turns black. The images become negative. A tide-line makes its appearance. The old man walks along it. A young girl, Marie, darts around him. They lie down in the sand and embrace. When the picture is no longer solarized, they have disappeared and where the girl was, is now a disintegrated skeleton.
After earth, fire and water the last element presents itself. A bitter, cutting wind races through a desolate, nineteenth-century, Stalker-like industrial landscape, in which dilapidated buildings and concrete palings are visible against a greenish daylight. This ruined place, devoid of any uses and left to the mercy of the elements, is the ultimate symbol of decay or, in other words, of death in life.
Water, now in the form of pouring rain (a marvellous metamorphosis of a street on washing day!) pours onto the windscreen of the taxi in which the girl is sitting next to the driver. The deadman sits in the backseat and looks with the same empty gaze at the driver being seduced by, and succumbing to, the girl. The images are discontinuous and negative. The driver’s panting, upward-reaching mouth, like an early Bacon, copulates soundlessly with the deadman’s hollow eyes.
The last scene takes place, once again, in the dimly-lit cafe. The camera moves along the bar and registers the fixated stares of those present. Zombie-like creatures — whose outward appearance calls to mind the lovers’ scene — shuffle along in the shadowy light. As if hypnotized, they look at the couple performing their ritual dance to the music of a slow, excruciating tango, ‘played’ by a sexually undefined trio, against the kitschy decor of an immense number of burning candles. After a short intermediate shot of the earlier burning stakes with the sun, the film culminates in the image of the deadman who, having now returned to the bar - this is perhaps the real ‘return’ - and completely absorbed by the woman’s naked sex, stumbles towards her. She christens him royally. His urine-drenched face stares into her crutch. The End.
2. Bataille’s Le Mort 
In the Autumn of 1942 Georges Bataille, at the time recuperating from a tubercular infection in Normandy, wrote a short text entitled Le Mort (The Death). This erotic text was not the first from his pen. Since the end of the twenties he had regularly written such texts, including Histoire de l’oeil (The Story of the Eye) and L’anus solaire (The Solar Anus). Exactly a year earlier he had written another, equally short, erotic text entitled Madame Edwarda. In this story the main character — who is both the first-person as well as the impersonal narrator of the story (in Kerkhof’s longer films this role is assumed by the filmic counterpart of the voice-over) — lands up in a brothel. On viewing a prostitute’s sex and on hearing her assertion that she is God, he becomes completely beside himself. With this same woman, at first inside and later outside the brothel, he experiences all kinds of excesses, including the ‘overmanning’ of a taxi-driver.
In The Death, it is a young woman, Marie, who in sheer despair at the death of her lover - which occurs at the beginning of the text and thus plays no further role in the story - revels in all kinds of sexual excesses (peeing, masturbating and vomiting as well as more ‘regular’ acts) as if attempting to ‘communicate’ one last time with her dead lover. When, after these escapades, she returns to the dead man’s house with one of the cafe customers, she kills herself, in his presence, over her lover’s dead body.
Bataille’s aim was to philosophise like a prostitute lifting up her skirts. These two pornographic stories, which at that time of course could not be published or only under a pseudonym, form an integral part of a literary, (art-)philosophical and academic oeuvre which appeared between 1928 and 1962 and which, certainly at the time of both the stories named above, was strongly inclined towards Nietschean ideas. Bataille’s obsession with the impact of breaking boundaries through a mixture of eroticism, violence and ‘mystical’ ecstasy makes his ideas, in the first instance, somewhat alienating. In a radical and uncompromising fashion he attempts to express the fascination and repulsion for the complete stranger — or in other words our fear in the presence of what, in more archaic times, was termed the sacred and in our Christian culture, God (or the Devil) — by means of highly unconventional images and various literary and academic devices. Through his often shocking linguistic images, Bataille attempts to illuminate the empty space left by ‘the death of God’ in the modern period. For Bataille, language is a tool for rendering this experience in such a way that the reader has no choice other than to surrender to it. Content and form are so intertwined that the subject-matter is, as it were, actually experienced through the reader’s interaction with the text. In the case of The Death, Bataille even adapts the graphic design to the content: the short text fragments are printed within black funereal borders. Or to put this filmically: Bataille adapts his frames to the experience contained within them.
One of the central themes in Bataille’s work is the effect of sacrifice as a stimulus to intercourse. It is precisely the ritualized context in which sacrifice takes place which enables individuals in an indirect, because mediated, way to experience that which transcends their life, and in a paradoxical way to attribute meaning to it. In a world without God, in our thoroughly rational modern culture, this dimension of experience can only be imagined in terms of our own death. Sacrifice, according to Bataille, brings death into life. He interprets sacrifice as a one-way gift with no possibility of a return gift. For him it is a complete waste. This idea breaks with the principle of the modern, rational economy based on usefulness and productivity, or in other words on a thoroughly rational order which only makes large-scale investments when these will produce even greater benefits in return.
But sacrifice, as well as symbolizing waste, is also an expression of the ability to completely lose oneself. This losing - and here we have the intertwining of mysticism and eroticism which is so characteristic of Bataille’s thinking - is a literal stepping outside of oneself: an ecstasy, a little death (’la petite mort’ also means tremor or orgasm). Although this may in the first instance seem somewhat banal, vomiting, like every other form of violent ejection and excretion is for Bataille an expression of this excessive ecstasy: that which is inside is, as it were, drawn out. The fragile dividing-line between a restrictively compressed inside and a threatening outside world, between our autonomous subjectivity from which we think we can control the world and the heterogeneous forces with which we are continually bombarded, is temporarily dissolved. In this dislocation, archaic man could still divine the presence of the gods. For the modern individualised person this overpowering experience, which is also present during intercourse, is by definition a threat to individuality. Only occasionally, and as the by-product of conscious excess, can it be experienced. Eroticism and art, according to Bataille, are the privileged spheres within which, in a world without rituals and deprived of all sacredness, crossing boundaries and losing oneself, or waste and sacrifice, can take place.
These, roughly speaking, are the main ideas underlying the various texts which Bataille wrote during the Second World War. It should be clear that no qualitative distinction can be made between his erotic texts and the more literary-philosophical works, such as his contemporaneous work about Nietzsche and L’expérience intérieure (The Inner Experience). In each text language is used as a means to literally unsettle the objectifying, controlling approach of both the reading as well as the writing subject. In this sense Bataille’s work is extremely violent. But, as will also be clear, this violence cannot be equated with manifest forms of aggressive behaviour. It is more subtle, more diverse, but above all more radical because it exposes every form of authority or power to its own underlying principle: violence. In this sense Bataille’s literary violence is self-reflexive.
3. Medium-specific cruelty: the dislocatory power of film
Bataille’s understanding of the paradoxical nature of the modern world - its repulsion for, and fascination with, boundary-breaking violence - has inspired many artists and philosophers. Ian Kerkhof is not the first to occupy himself with Bataille’s erotic texts and will not be the last. In recent years, among art forms which concentrate on the moving image, there have been a number of plays as well as Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn’s 1989 film entitled The Deadman. Although the inspiration, Bataille’s text, and the medium are the same, there is little similarity apart from this in either form or content and thus only a minimal grounds for comparison between the two films. Only indirectly is there a ‘reflexive’ similarity: a curious kind of laughter. Although there are as few genuine guffaws in Ahwesh and Sanborn’s film as in Kerkhof’s, on two occasions an unexpected eruption of laughter can be heard: two interruptions to the somewhat sterile, because completely predictable, filmic procedure which the Americans follow, their ‘literal’ filming of a literary text. For reasons which remain unclear to me, the canned laughter of a fictional ‘audience’ has been edited onto two scenes. Immediately the question arises as to why there should be this break in the story, which seems as arbitrary as it is abrupt. Do the film-makers intend to highlight the flimsy reality of the film? Because that is the effect they achieve: through the interjections of laughter the film acquires the reflexive space which is so characteristic of the late modern film. The superficiality of cinematographic means, the radical realization of pretence is suddenly brought ‘into the picture’ by that laughter. Yet these seem to be the only two exciting moments in what is really rather a monotonous film.
What makes Ahwesh and Sanborn’s film above all so dull is their inability to translate the ‘pornographic’ quality of Bataille’s text into their own medium. In the end what Ahwesh and Sanborn produce is merely an illustration of the story. In contrast, Ian Kerkhof understands that a filming of a text by Bataille by definition implies a departure from the text. Of course moral sensibility changed drastically in the fifties: what was experienced as shocking at the time Bataille produced his text is these days at most just an amusing banality. But Kerkhof’s departure consists, however, not in shifting the boundaries of the obscene or abhorrent, but rather in the perception that cruelty is always medium-specific: the pornographic quality of the language has to be translated into the medium of film.
This implies a violent use of cinematic means, a nouvelle violence, which has to do with form more than content. Violence and obscenity are only partly situated in the content of the images we see. The crude pornographic genre results from a process of objectification, inherent to a culture which takes the principle of ’seeing is believing’ as the ultimate barometer of truth. However it is above all the manner of showing, or rather the showing itself, in which the obscenity lies. If we are to believe Jean Boudrillard then our culture is pornographic through and through, because the desire for truth has lead us to expose our entire world to the objectifying and literally fragmentary effects of the camera. In this sense, our modern Western culture is pornographic to its very core because ‘everything’ has to be shown. The gaze has become all pervasive. The viewer is spared nothing, in spite of the fact that, certainly in American films, an almost Victorian censorship is in operation. This compulsion to show everything is perhaps the reason why Ahwesh and Sanborn have made a literal filming of Bataille’s text. But, ironically enough, the many TV programmes — for which the cinematographic process still remains constitutive — in which every intimacy is made public, are in fact more ‘pornographic’ than the sporadic programmes in which explicit sex is shown.
Kerkhof thus interprets the pornographic quality of Bataille’s text through both form and content. The sexual aberrations which it contains have their formal counterpart in his ‘mis-handling’ of filmic devices. Through the style of camera work, through the use of unconventional frames and the ’stretching’ of time, the spectators are left to the mercy of their own obscene gaze. The slowness of many scenes, created by a complete immobilization of movement, opens up a space in which the spectator’s gaze is turned back on itself. This makes it possible to see in a different way or, at least, to have one’s attention drawn to other, often unnoticed, aspects of the filmic event. But, this means that Kerkhof is balancing on the edge of artistic disaster: will the public become bored or will they allow themselves to be drawn into a different attitude or sensitivity towards the images they see?
Medial self-referentiality is perhaps the essence of Kerkhof’s filmic experiment. Its biggest risk is without doubt a trivialization of the images. Just as the aestheticizing of eroticised bodies leads to deathly boredom - see in this light the work of David Hamilton or more recently Adrian Lyne - so also an over-pronounced manipulation of obscene images can utterly destroy the medium’s cutting edge. The film then loses its reflexivity and turns into a figurative medium, or in other words mere pornography. The fragmentation of the bodies and the delay in the action are no longer seen. The vision loses its depth.
Kerkhof’s conscious cutting technique thus exposes the pornographic quality of this gaze. At first content and form reinforce each other, but later they become disjointed, revealing the cruelty, the violence done towards things by their willful objectification. That which is shown is also made experiential. The violence takes place in relation to the viewers themselves, so that they can no longer remain uninvolved. The mere act of looking means that the spectators themselves experience the objectifying gaze, the means of keeping things at a distance. The effect is, in the most literal sense, strongly philosophical: pure reflection. The onlookers see themselves looking. And herein lies the cutting of our own flesh. Kerkhof draws the radical consequences of our interaction with the world. The Return of the Deadman offers more than a simple re-presentation of a fundamental violence, as is the case in Ahwesh and Sanborn’s film, where the cinematographic operation is also a self-reflexive presentation of itself, producing a film à la Bataille, a Bataillesque film. The Deadman, on the other hand, is a film about a text by Bataille, a Bataillean film. In contrast to the Americans’ film, which is simply an illustration of a text, Kerkhof manages to use his resources to recreate the intensity of Bataille’s text. Only through a medium-specific cruelty, in other words, through a conscious ‘mis-use’ and sacrificing of established cinematic procedures can the dislocation of the seeing subject be effected.
