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a portrait of medieval squalor and depravity clearly conversant with the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini which gained a degree of infamy in the U.S. as The Pig-Fucking Movie. Des Morts begins with an American mortician in a crisp white lab coat grooming a dead body—the first of many visible herein—cleaning the hands with the intent efficiency of a trained manicurist. Alain Pierre’s electronic dirge scores the scene, one of the few instances of non-diegetic music in this otherwise stark, undecorated film, which also dispenses with the usual master-of-ceremonies narration, making its rhetorical points through editing instead. Pierre’s synths give way to dolorous chanting and khene mouth-organs, as we leave the secretive rites of the embalming ritual for a public ceremony in the mountains north of Tailand, where a Hmong family grieves for their dead matriarch over a number of days preceding her burial, as the features of the deceased swell, darken, and distort for all to see like rotting fruit.


“A person who has just been pronounced dead is very little different from that same person 5, 10, or 15 seconds earlier when he was presumably alive” says the operator of a Los Angeles cryogenics facility, practiced in selling denial of the inevitable. His statement is followed by a hard cut to a crumpled, sodden, unmistakably dead corpse splayed on a Tibetan ghat, feet dragging in the water. (In subject matter and grim beauty, the image anticipates Robert Gardner’s 1986 Forest of Bliss.) Another sort of modern immortality is represented by the videotaped image of a man who died of liver cancer in 1974, seen discussing his own impending end, his commentary commented on by his widow in turn. (“Every time I see this film, I am very happy to see Manny. It brings him back to me for another hour.”)


Operating in the globe-trotting spirit of Mondo Cane, Des


mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


Morts visits altogether six countries and three continents. We see funeral processions wending their way towards village cemeteries in Zéno’s native Wallonia and the theatrical ululation at a South Korean wake (Bong Joon- ho’s 2006 Te Host has some fun with this demonstrative tradition.) In the Mexican countryside, tolling church bells summon back the souls of the departed on Día de los Muertos, matadors deliver fatal estocadas to bulls, and a mariachi band addresses a song to “baldlady” death. (Beginning in 1984, Zéno would live among and document the Tzotziles tribe of Mexico and their Zapatista Army of National Liberation, from whence came his film ¡Ya basta!) In a Mexico City emergency room, a man assaulted outside of his mother’s funeral, his torso perforated with multiple stab wounds, is sewn back together. As he discusses his ordeal, his neighbor in an adjacent bed struggles and dies. Were it not for the unmistakable veracity of the footage, one would be tempted to dismiss such happenstance as a staged Faces of Death hoax.


Time and again, intimate traditional cleansing


ceremonies are contrasted with impersonal, efficient modern methods of processing,


public Buddhist


cremations with the industrial disposal of a corpse in a cardboard coffin, a corpse which we then see bubbling and hissing and crackling before our very eyes. Hospital visits, like that to the muscular dystrophy ward, allow the filmmakers to come to the very threshold of mortality. By exposing the mortuary industry’s backstage workings, Des Morts violates the sanitizing conspiracy that industry represents: A private pilot explains his bulk business of sprinkling cremated remains over the San Francisco Bay; a funeral director gives a guided tour of luxury coffins while, behind the scenes, we see dead meat perfunctorily sutured, a corpse’s face cosmetized for viewing.


But if the filmmakers’ initial plan was to establish


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