The Knowing
By: Anthony Myles
Tags: Critical Thinking, Social Media, Conspiracy Theories, Fake News, Fact Checking

The only remaining frame from Matthias Aarseth’s first anamorphic and color film, The Knowing. It was procured by the American Film Institute in 1998 from an unknown seller in Malmö, Sweden.

Our collective world is rich not only with the greatest store of information in the history of our species, but also with unparalleled access to it. This escalating truth paradoxically creates Lethean waters in which monoliths of antiquity can be erased from public consciousness. Examples of literature and art, cultures and accomplishments, will forever be victim to the erosion of time, never to be rescued by online databases. Artifacts new and old ceaselessly slip through the fingers of dedicated historians, leaving only questions in their absence. Our Information Superhighway has become increasingly focused on looking forward and ignoring scenic routes and pit stops, those facets of our collective consciousness that impart flavor to our cultures. Is the medium itself at fault in reconstructing our past and present in a homogenous glob of bland but easily digested gruel? An energy dense but nutrient poor diet eagerly consumed by the masses. Even memory and truth seem permeable to this strange ghost in the machine, take for comical example the amok outlier of the Berestein Bears. “In actuality, this series is called the BerenSTAIN bears, named after its creators. This seems like a simple misunderstanding… The problem is, the internet nearly unanimously agrees. Why would so many people share the same false memory” (Slomka). Something as simple as the title of a children’s book has inspired notions of the intrusion of alternate realities or survivors/tourists from those realities. Is this testable, is this provable? Do we even know what is true anymore and can we recognize when we are being lied to?

All of these questions and examples can be applied to perhaps the greatest loss of cinematic art in modernity, the bizarre near erasure of the controversial films of Matthias Aarseth from history.

Promotional still believed to be taken from a projection print of Inflame Thy Heart upon its arrival and screening in New York City, c. 1930.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise if you haven’t heard of him, this is a deliberate result of his controversial career and the absurd and successful efforts to eliminate him and his influence. The scattershot extant records of Aarseth, as a man, are incomplete and contradictory to the point where truth and fable coexist. What is regarded as indisputable fact is that he was born in northern Norway, in either Tromsø or Harstad, near the end of the 1800’s, and spent the majority of his youth in orphanages. His formal education, if he received one, remains a matter of debate for scholars, as nearly twenty years of his life is presumed undocumented. The next mention of him is after directing his second American film, Red Lake Niðstäng, in 1928 or 1929. The ensuing years brought increased interest in his early works, his modest European oeuvre, and those films enjoyed art house screenings and dutiful professional praise. The short films Ash Angel and Inflame Thy Heart, were lauded as the best examples of the filmmaking craft to date. What was evident from those early films was the instant emergence of a master of his craft. He arrived fully formed, with an impeccably evolved style that rivaled or surpassed his American peers. However, heavy derision was cast upon him solely for his chosen genre, Aarseth’s work was unrepentantly dominated by horror.

The only remaining, haunting frame, from Aarseth’s American debut, Red Lake Niðstäng. It was rumored that certain scenes were hand-colored, however this image is as it was found in the morgue of the Kenosha News, in 2005.

As in today’s climate, this made it easy for professional critics and uneducated audiences to offhandedly disregard his work to the point of ignoring its inclusion in then-modern society. Horror was and is considered a low form of filmmaking. If art were a meritocracy, Aarseth’s name would be still be uttered in the same circles by those who praise Welles, Tarkovsky, Cassavetes, Tarantino, Raimi, and Nolan. The effectiveness of his films only seemed to work toward Aarseth’s detriment, by all accounts his movies were terrifying to an unparalleled degree. This includes his early silent films, which were banned in several American cities, although existing records fail to delineate a proper or unified point of contention. However, it is generally accepted that the reasons for censure of his earlier work and that of his more notorious late body of films are the same. Working with limited and nascent filmmaking and editing technologies, budgets that are laughable by today’s standards, and almost exclusively within the realm of black and white, Matthias Aarseth’s films have been documented as intentionally inspiring madness within a small but statistically significant portion of his audience.

This image has been attributed to Aarseth’s second short film, The Silencing Machine, but its provenence is uncertain and could prove to be from a wholly different film or filmmaker.

Aarseth’s work remains the preeminent and most extreme example of the much-debated Stendhal Syndrome, “a very rare… clinical phenomenon in which the presence of a beautiful piece of [art] work or architecture causes dysautonomic symptoms such as tachycardia, diaphoresis, chest pains and loss of consciousness” (“Study Findings from University of Rosario Broaden Understanding of Neurology”), and occasionally hallucinations. Stendhal Syndrome is believed to be psychosomatic in origin but is not a recognized mental disease or condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. While references to this condition in congruence with his films have been found from as late as 1953, it seems ill-fitting, for if this label applies at all it’s one that is exhibited to its nth degree. What the psychological sciences of the time claim is that people were literally visually reprogrammed into committing heinous acts. Ordinary people were driven to insanity, suicide, and murder after viewing Aarseth’s films. The statistical correlation took years to prove, but it’s estimated as many as 9% of those that viewed Aarseth’s films were affected in those extreme manners, and all viewers reported some negative psychological consequences ranging from nausea, paranoia, and insomnia. Proving intent and causation was well beyond the scope of the law then, and perhaps even now, and no charges outside of the court of public opinion were ever filed. This was irrespective of the fact that wherever Matthias Aarseth films were shown, death and madness followed.

The only known frame from Aarseth’s final and unseen film, Bleed for Me Again. It’s a matter of contention how the color palette was achieved, but analaysis has shown that this frame is color film stock and was likely created in-camera.

How this level of psychological unmaking was achieved may likely never be known, as the entirety of Aarseth’s seventeen feature films and twenty-one short films, are assumed lost or destroyed. Public and professional outcry reached a zenith in 1952, when Aarseth was given little option between fleeing America or never making another film. While he was crafting his final three films in Europe, his only color films, zealotry seized upon his absence in America. Small temperance movements operated with impunity and physically destroyed all known archives of his films. Private collections were bought or stolen and then promptly burned. An attitude that eventually wormed its way across the Atlantic and saw equal successes, to the degree that his final film, Bleed for Me Again, never saw release before being destroyed. His final works were claimed to be the most experimental, using color in an unrealistic and expressionistic manner, which was later borrowed upon to a lesser degree by Italian filmmaker Dario Argento in the 1970’s. Less than thirty still images from publicity materials and test prints across nine movies are all that remain of his films. They will never see motion again.

Another rescued frame from The Knowing, which remains the only film of Aarseth’s with multiple surviving examples of its imagery.

Cineastes reading this will undoubtedly see unmistakable parallels between Aarseth’s history and that of the novel Flicker, by the cultural scholar, Theodore Roszak. This is due to Roszak borrowing heavily from the mythos of Aarseth to craft his fictional novel. Aarseth’s death is as shrouded in mystery as his motivation and methodology for making films of such deliberate malice. He self-exiled after the destruction of his final film, leaving behind no wife and no children, only questions, as he was never seen again. The present can only speculate upon the true power of his films. Were they as powerful as their existing legend, or have they been labeled with a grandiosity that is unearned but can never be challenged? Those questions are inherently meaningless, as Matthias Aarseth and his films are complete works of fiction. None of it is true. However, this realization, buried within the body of the sixth paragraph, asks a singular question to the reader; did you believe this story? If your answer is in the affirmative, ask yourself why.