What’s it like being mental? I know this seems like a crass and antagonistic question to pose, but for some who suffer from various clouds of mental health issues (like myself), its something I always feel is on the tip of other people’s tongues if only they could flick it off. What does it look like to them? The Other Side of the Underneath, feminist surrealist Jane Arden’s 1972 film about a group of girls’ visions, therapy, nightmares and exorcism from “schizophrenia”, filmed in South Wales and, reportedly, with scenes filmed as the cast members peaked on LSD, is a raw, extreme piece of British psychotronica that feels filled with fumes of anxiety and banshee-delivered primality.
Beginning with a piece of prose on the screen about consciously awakening from a metaphoric coma, a rebirth from the celeste of mortal darkness, we’re instantly given a series of visual textures that defines the rest of the experience. Coal black muds and barren grass greens. A wind-whipped, poisoned air that will chloroform you before the cloth does. Industrial, rural textures of quarry town plumes. Mineshafts and flowers. Chimneys and horses. Isolated and cold. Smashed mirror handovers like fragments of the mind are gifts. From house, to church, to dream, to hillside, the film feels that pastoral chill across its forehead. The camera close enough to the girls in the home to be distorted at the extremities of the screen, close enough you can feel the heat off their eyeballs. Even the sound design coalesces with the misama on-screen. Doors creak open and merge into cello string screeches. A character’s vision of herself in a corner comes to play the aforementioned instrument as she scores her own mania:
“One cell, Multiply”
“One cell, Multiply”
As the strings are plucked. The film’s identity becomes at one with an incantation of hysteria that never leaves, even after the sound/visuals part from one another. There’s a genuine, beatified surreality to everything that normally you’d scoff at an artist for (and it does feel closer to pretentious at times) but the honesty and frightening lack of leash here makes it a true experimental, in-camera rage of catatonia and fear.
Arden’s filmmaking-as-therapy sees her making an endurance for audience and crew, as her catharsis of making art becomes antagonizing. This is meant to be a document of hysteria. Every scene filled with howls, wails, glassy tears and screams are like opening a vein to god. The girls, Arden’s real life theatre troupe, named Holocaust, are forced by character and, by extension, reality, to confront, hit and be intimate with themselves (and Arden’s husband Jack Bond, who appears briefly). Even Jane herself is inserted into the film as a therapist, making everything feel blended across interpretation. It’s a perverse, chaotic sentiment that turns the film into something almost confrontationally personal.
There are scenes of therapy that are catastrophically helpless, oppressed by ghosts of the mind. Visions of demons by bedside, sheep as protection totems, feather showers on wedding days that collide as funerals, contradictory displays of sexuality that wax and wane from euphoria to self-flagellation. The lack of true cohesion gives off a miasma so acrid that it clouds the mind. Even as it descends into Farmland Elvis sing-alongs, Cabaret nudity and Religious Martyrdom, the films sense of razor-edge frenzy never stops, and its dischordancy might stay as a constant refrain in your head long after the film ends.
As one of the of the characters states in the aforementioned therapy scenes, “Under each of us is all the pain. All the love. All this pain, its so simple. Just empty it out, there’s no change.”
The girls’ lack of diagnosis or closure is the fear that all of us have. An ear-gnawing rat that keeps us up at night on that fine line between sleep. What if I’m never better? Will those circles around my eyes be embossed forever as rancid trophies, or will I be crucified as a public cause? And something like The Other Side of the Underneath can only say, “What an obscenity”, as you see a projection of yourself on-screen.
The Reptile House
The Other Side of the Underneath screens at Weird Weekend III, 12:30 on Saturday 29.10.22, part of the House of Psychotic Women strand. Buy tickets here.
The Reptile House is the alias of Findlay, which is the nickname of the author himself. A banner under which all collective writing, art, submissions and soon-to-be-screenings is nestled. Reflected in the dark terraces of The Reptile House is cinematic pain and oscillations coming from old Adidas brochures. Always open to collaboration. @antibloom
