Awakening of the Beast

Few film-makers in history can have been as closely identified with their creations as Brazilian director José Mojica Marins and his Coffin Joe (Zé do Caixão) character, a megalomaniac, seemingly omnipotent gravedigger dressed entirely in black and sporting six-inch long clawlike fingernails.

Supposedly coming to the director in a nightmare, Marins first incarnated his creation in 1964's At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (A Meia-Noite Levarei Sua Alma) which saw Coffin Joe on a quest to find a woman worthy of bearing his child and, in the process murdering his best friend Antonio and raping Antonio's betrothed Terezinha, causing her to commit suicide. A sequel, 1967's This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver) soon followed, seeing Joe up to his old tricks, putting his victims into a torture chamber where he tests their mettle with poisonous spiders and snakes and, at the climax, being taken to hell where he imagines himself as Satan.

Joe's exploits struck a chord with Brazilian audiences and a television series, comic books and assorted merchandise including a samba record and even Coffin Joe cosmetics appeared in the interim while Marins planned the next installment in the series, Awakening of the Beast.

A more complex and multi-layered work than its predecessors, the 1969 film sees Marins taking a relatively self-conscious, "intellectual" approach and blurring the boundaries between himself and his creation in such a way that some critics – the Aurum Film Encyclopedia, to name the guilty – thought he was insane, unable to distinguish between Joe and himself and – most disturbing of all – making films as a form of therapy in which he could exercise (exorcise?) his sadistic and misogynistic fantasies.

As it is, both Marins and Joe have relatively minor roles to play in the first half of the film, which is dominated by a series of vignettes illustrating the dangers of drugs and the sorry state of contemporary Brazil. Coffin Joe appears briefly as a master of ceremonies type figure, addressing the spectator directly, while Marins is shown on a television programme debating whether he is real or a fraud. (His music also plays during one of the drugs segments.)

As the film progresses, the connections between the different strands gradually become clearer. The drugs scenes illustrate case studies from the work of Dr Sergio, himself appearing on a TV panel show and going on to then describing his experiments into the effects of LSD. Four volunteers were asked for their opinions of Marins and Coffin Joe, given LSD, taken to see This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse and their reactions studied. Each subject experienced nightmarish visions of torture and humiliation at the hands of Coffin Joe.

Finally, it is revealed that Dr Sergio's subjects were given a placebo. Their reactions were down to auto-suggestion – or, perhaps, Coffin Joe's magical powers – and that, as such, drugs are really not so dangerous or powerful as the authorities would have us think.

No mere synopsis can adequately convey the strangeness of cinematic vision expressed in Awakening of the Beast. Like Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou and Mario Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World – points of reference are hard to come by when one is discussing such a sui generis work – the film really needs to be experienced in all its febrile glory.

While one can understand the Brazilian dictatorship banning the film for the better part of two decades for its subversive content, the attitude of the critics outlined above is rather more difficult to explain.

Coffin Joe's excesses are problematic, to be sure, but this does not mean that Marins himself is anything other than a mild-mannered, somewhat eccentric film-maker merely playing a character.

What makes it odder is that in almost every other regard, Marins film seems to (unwittingly) exemplify postmodern, deconstructive and Brechtian characteristics that would otherwise be applauded. Here is Marins a good 20 years before Wes Craven's New Nightmare playing on the distinction between himself (and, if one likes, 'Marins') and his fictional alter Coffin Joe. And here are a self-conscious theatricality of mise-en-scene and performance, along with jump cuts, machine-gun edits, jarring zooms and assorted other devices to foreground the artifice of all that we are seeing.

One sequence, for instance, depicts a drugged woman being molested by a Christ-like figure wielding a wooden staff. Marins intercuts between three shots of the woman's face contorted in pain/pleasure, the shadow on the wall showing her penetration by Christ's staff, and Christ manipulating his, er, pole. Besides the blasphemous nature of the scene, there's a complete disregard for the 180 degree rule, the angles of the shots being mutually exclusive.

Or take a casting couch segment where a bloated bourgeois attempts to have his way with a young woman seeking a cleaning job, in which the director applies interior monologues to illustrate their definitions of the situation – she thinks that he thinks that she thinks – acommpanied by some distinctly Eisensteinian images of the bourgeois depicted as a toy dog and a horse.

Plus, to top it all off, we have the anti-authoritarian, anti-religious, liberationist sentiments expressed.

Yet one is also aware that justifying Awakening of the Beast worth through reference to continental theory is an equally flawed analysis. It would be an Eurocentric approach to take; one that neglects the importance of Brazil's own modernist and avant-garde movements, such as "cannibalism" (itself surfacing in a few more respectable art-house/festival circuit type entries around the same time as Marins' film) and one that tries to force the film-maker and his creations into an ill-fitting, rather too predetermined schema.

Marins's "cinema of garbage" seems ripe for evaluation and – yes – transvaluation…

Sound and picture quality on this all-region PAL DVD from Mondo Macabro are pretty decent given the age and nature of the piece. Indeed, one might even be thankful to the Brazilian authorities for keeping the source print safely esconced in the vaults all those years. The only weakness is that occasionally the English subtitles are displayed too low down on the image to be visible, though fortunately no crucial plot points appear to be lost thereby.

The package is a good one as well, with nicely animated menus, a handy mini-biography and filmography of Marins and a 24 minute edit of the Mondo Macabro TV documentary "The Nightmares of Coffin Joe" that packs a lot in to its running time and includes valuable contributions from Marins himself, editor Niclemar Leyart, cinematographer Giorgio Attili and biographer André Barcinski. We even get to see Marins at the Sundance Film Festival – attending a screening of Barcinski's 2000 documentary Coffin Joe: The Strange World of Jose Mojica Marins alongside a bemused looking Michael Stipe.

Overall, another excellent release from Mondo Macabro as well as a good introduction to Marins cinema before one shells out on Fantoma's lavish three disc coffin shape box set…

Want to know more? Check out The Coffin Joe Homepage.