Hessian Cinema

In our holistic quest for the hessian spirit in its manifold manifestations through a variety of forms, for once we’ll be looking at some examples from the cinematic arts.

Much like modern heavy metal, or music in general, cinema today is an industry dominated by mass-produced, trite and predictable entertainment for undemanding masses and dictated by largely meaningless trends; among the dreck, however, it is possible to track the gems, few and increasingly rare as they are, most produced independently from the commercial circuit, even if this requires time and thorough investigation that many people won’t grant to such a quest, hence the need for articles like this. This is obviously not meant to be a comprehensive list but rather a small selection of suggestions that we feel every serious fan of heavy metal music and its weltanschauung should be acquainted with. We’ll also avoid the more obvious choices that we assume most hessians are already familiar with – the countless slashers, gore flicks, Z films, New French Extremity and more mainstream affairs such as Conan the Barbarian or Lord of the Rings, without dismissing their value and resonance with the hessian ideals – in order to focus on less popular works more likely to be overlooked.

An anthology consisting of four japanese folk tales brought to sumptuous, breathing life. The segments feature a wide range of moods, specially within the darker side of the emotional pallet, reflecting on a series of topics such as honour, warrior virtues and death. All of the stories are theatrical, meaningful and lavishly presented and although they differ in purpose and theme, their conjunction provides a spiritually cohesive whole that essentially allows the viewer to immerse himself in the distinct emanations of the same underlying tradition graciously revealing itself. Certainly one of the best cinematic adaptations of nipponic folklore ever attempted.

Bergman, one of the undisputed masters of cinema, creates in this lesser known work of his one of the most fulfilled gothic atmospheres in any film. A struggling artist and his wife isolate themselves on a small island where haunting memories and whispering demons gradually invade until they physically manifest. The Romantic portrayal of nature, night and the titular “hour of the wolf” as the time where spirits roam undisturbed and the simultaneous wonder and horror that the grand and beautiful landscapes evoke, communicate a frame of mind where primordial emotions – particularly fear – are highlighted and insanity becomes the only inevitable outcome from this invading “id” into the weakening diurnal consciousness shocked with its own insignificance before the vast dark powers surrounding it.

Radically cut from the sentimentalism that pervades the majority of Hollywood filmmaking, “Angst” is the serial killer film that most efficiently immerses the viewer in the twisted mind of the protagonist (here, the killer). We’re invited to watch closely from his point of view, witnessing each bloody massacre first hand and hearing his deranged thoughts, which are constantly emitted in a stream-of-consciousness fashion that lends an oneiric quality to this completely cold and relentlessly brutal experience that ended up banned in many european countries.

Most will dismiss this admittedly difficult experience as hipster navel-gazing nonsense. In many ways, this is the filmic equivalent of what black metal sounds like to foreign listeners – incomprehensible, twisted, esoteric and obscurantist – and essentially consists in a series of deliberately fuzzy and sometimes imperceptible images forming a macabre mythodrama reflecting the necessary cycle of death and rebirth (we’ll note that it all starts with a primordial God disemboweling himself and spawning from this act other deities which will be sacrificed later). Independently of the value each viewer will find in the movie, the director is successful in capturing the eternal movements underlying reality through an ancestral consciousness or, in his own words, “a time that predates spoken language”. To quote Hesse, “only for the alienated”.

This little estonian film that sadly didn’t secure theatrical release in most countries provides perhaps one of the most faithful and awe-inspiring renditions of the spirit of european fairy tales (in their original variety and not the modern sanitized versions), drawing from folk tales, paganism and black magic and indulging in a dark and autumnal mix of filth, grimness, selfish motives and some redeeming innocence that timidly reveals itself sporadically like sun rays piercing the fog. The main sin here is the film’s enamourment with the very world it creates (which is, indeed, incredibly realized), leading to too many exploratory narrative deviations where a leaner approach would make for a more organized work. Nevertheless, the resulting work is so fascinatingly accomplished that such flaws are easily overlooked, as the viewer who ignores this criminally underappreciated offering is missing out on one of the best films of this kind in recent memory.