Image courtesy of Factory 25
Go Down Death
Benjamin Minter in "Go Down Death."
It’s easy to discern the filmmakers who influenced director Aaron Schimberg’s resolutely bizarre debut feature, Go Down Death. The bent and broken worlds of Jean Pierre Jeunet, David Lynch, Guy Maddin, and Béla Tarr all inform Schimberg’s film, but Go Down Death is unmistakably striving for novelty, rather than mimicry or homage. While the film never quite achieves the artistic originality or psychological potency that it gropes towards, Schimberg’s creation is appealingly sinister and unpredictable. Viewers on the same surrealistic wavelength as Eraserhead and Cowards Bend the Knee will likely find a dark diversion or two within Go Down Death.
Allegedly adapted from the scrawlings of an American folklorist, the film unfolds primarily within a grim village that is shrouded in perpetual gloom and assaulted by howling winds. (The latter recalls Tarr’s nihilistic masterwork, The Turin Horse.) In a series of disjointed scenes, the exhausted, despairing inhabitants of the town have elliptical, ominous conversations, many of them one-sided. Everyone seems to be talking past one another. A sour, indolent john bores a prostitute with his ramblings. A menacing doctor interrogates an oblivious, grinning farmer. A deformed gambler and inept vocalist confess their fears to one another, but neither truly listens.
At times, Go Down Death seems to be reveling in opaqueness and repetition, but this sort of borderline punk approach doesn’t fit with the film’s powerful mood of dissolution and looming calamity. Go Down Death’s black-and-white 16 mm format and quasi-Expressionist sets both contribute to this entropic aura, and the film’s jarring extended epilogue drives home the emergent theme: everything falls apart. It’s not clear that this observation warrants 87 minutes of desolate weirdness, unless one has a taste for such things. Still, during a holiday weekend when the multiplexes are overrun with Transformers, a little weirdness might be warranted.
Go Down Death screens nightly at 7:30 p.m. on July 3–4 and 6–8 at the Webster University Film Series at the Winifred Moore Auditorium, 470 E. Lockwood. Admission is $6 (cash only).
