April 01, 2009

The Blood Shed

Something Great

This was posted as part of the Third Annual White Elephant Film Blogathon.

In the January 1954 edition of “The Cahiers du Cinéma” Francois Truffaut published an article called “Une certaine tendance du cinema francais” (A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema). This article, which he had been developing at least since 1952, heavily criticized the state of French cinema by pointing out that the styles and features being produced by it were in effect boring, amoral, and so preoccupied with a ”Tradition of Quality” that they where incapable of creating a real “auteur cinema”. He defended the role of the director as the main creator behind each movie calling this concept a “politique des auteurs”; this, he argued, did not exist in French cinema but was ever present in Hollywood movies at the time (the main example of them being Hitchcock, Hawks and Preminger). The argument was appreciation not of the Hollywood filmmaking machine, but of the ability of certain directors to take these violent and exciting plots and concepts and yet make a coherent, highly artistic line of work… an oeuvre if you will.

Right now Hollywood, and I doubt I need to say this, is not the same thing it used to be when Truffaut defended its auteurs. It is independent film where movie lovers have turned to in order to find this particular artistic search of a director who has his own voice. This brings me to the movie I am reviewing: “The Blood Shed” directed and written by Alan Rowe Kelly (who also happens to play the part of “Beeftena”). The movie opens with the aforementioned Beeftena skipping down the street in a Jersey suburb dragging along her pet (a dead squirrel tied to a wooden cart), the suburban inhabitants of the neighborhood criticize her at a distance and in fact some of the children make fun of her. One of these kids actually throws the little squirrel down a stream while verbally abusing Mr. Kelly’s character. Beeftena’s two brothers come to her defense, which leads to a game of tug of war that ends up with a dead neighborhood kid that they hide in the title’s shed.

This movie does not subscribe to your traditional 3-act structure, nor should it attempt to do this. It is not plot driven (as a matter of fact at times It seems to forget to follow a plot) and works more as a character and genre study. This latter intention is where the auteurship of Mr. Kelly’s effort really resides.

The focus of “The Blood Shed” is the Bullion family, a cannibalistic, inbred group of freaks that live in a very dilapidated home and are responsible for a series of disappearances in the area. Kelly brilliantly shows this with carefully crafted moments that shine light on the character of each member of the family. During one dinnertime scene (in which he displays his masterful use of the close up in order to create a sense of beauty through the absurd and grotesque) Beeftena approaches his father with great happiness after being informed that her birthday party is going to be one for the ages. As they converse the father’s hand disappears under her skirt only to retire it after and smell his fingers. In just one little moment of one scene we know that the rumors of incest that have been thrown around before, are in fact truth; that this particularly act is as normal as they come in this particular family, and that Beeftena curries particular favor from her father. This subtlety, completely uncommon in the realms of the horror genre, is exactly what makes this movie more important than what you would imagine just by seeing the cover of the DVD.

If we go back to Truffaut we can see that the movies he, and the other Cahiers critics, loved where for the most part film noir and suspense efforts, mass culture movies that other people dismissed and they propped up as examples of high art. The noir has not stayed with us, at least not as this vilified example of mass culture to be sublimated, and while suspense is still here, it is more or less accepted (in large part thanks to the “politique des auteurs”) as something that can be a product of high art. This is not true of horror, which still lives in the realm of popular to low art. Maybe its time to re-examine that. Mr. Kelly definitively tries to push the, as of now, limited boundaries of the genre to include artistic and societal concerns that transcend the simple act of screaming in fear at a loud noise. We can take his examination and depiction of the grotesque as a very strong example of his pushing to find something new inside the genre. If Jan Svankmajer and Peter Greenaway made a career as directors who make high art by establishing a aesthetic of the grotesque, Kelly sublimates it in couple of scenes, one example is the aforementioned dinner scene, but the crowning jewel in this movie comes at the end of it: A victim of the Bullion family manages to escape Beeftena’s birthday party (a celebration of horrors and excesses that would have felt quite at home in a Buñuel movie) and after running around in the woods she reaches the lawn of a neighboring house. Standing there she sees Mrs. Kiggins and approaches her for help. When there is no answer she gets closer just to see that she has been savagely defaced by Beeftena, the edges of her mouth extended to her ears, while her body is impaled so as to remain standing. Mrs. Kiggins (“Such a beautiful Smile” Beeftena tells us) has been made into a statue of flesh, her features enhanced by the horrors inflicted upon them.

As for the societal concerns that it displays, pinpointing all of them could probably take up much more space than I have in this review. There is of course the more overt theme of suburbia moving on and engulfing the habitat of the poorer inhabitants of the state of Jersey. It is ultimately a class war between the rich suburbanites and the more modest people whose customs and traditions are under attack by the prevalent culture around them. Mr. Kelly, always the rebel, treats us to a victory by the forces that usually are defeated. But he does not stop there; he also pinpoints the abuse of the institutions that are supposed to protect us. A police officer pays a visit to the Bullion family with a pre-judgement of their guiltiness in respect of the murder of a boy, after stepping in with bravado (and no warrant) he searches for the family members, gun out and ready to take them down if necessary (here Mr. Kelly takes advantage to poke fun at the officer by having him perform a sort of a dance, in which he moves carefully through the family compound in usual police mannerisms, but with a grace that is reserved only for a ballet or modern dance routine). He invariably gets caught by the family, who then point out the police abuse that this sheriff was planning to commit (trespassing, no warrant, being judge and executioner), they turn the situation around on him by proceeding to torture him by popping his testicles with pliers. They have attacked his manhood, Mr. Kelly has taken the institution in society that relies the strongest on a mythology of manhood and has, in effect, castrated it. The little man beats the establishment again.

I wish I could say that Mr. Kelly will enter social consciousness and that his work will be appreciated more widely by people of all walks of life, unfortunately that tends to not be the career path of people that fight so strongly for an artistic vision. It is far more likely that he will continue to chug away making movies that expose our society and its vices, that explore a sense of beauty in the grotesque that most of us are not capable of sensing, that transcend the limitations of a genre to become a work of art, an auteur’s oeuvre, without ever obtaining the recognition that several lesser directors (and performers) have been able to attain. This is a sad indictment not of him, but of us and our immaturity as a film going public. I know for a fact that the next time someone asks me if I have watched anything good, I will say “I haven’t seen anything good, but I saw something great: The Blood Shed by Alan Rowe Kelly.”

Leo Roth edits movie trailers, loves the Miami Dolphins, and is a futbol fanatic. He currently resides in Brooklyn and, incase you're wondering, is single.