Tag Archives: White Gardenia

White Gardenia – John Calvin and Other Excerpts From the King James Bible (2025)

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Art’s inherent subjectivity is never more apparent than in abstract films. Without a traditional narrative structure and so much of the imagery left up to interpretation, the goal isn’t so much about determining whether something was “good” or “entertaining” so much as it is understanding the artist’s motivation and goals and whether or not they were able to achieve them. Spearheaded by underground artist Daniel Valient, White Gardenia’s John Calvin is in many ways a significant departure from the style and content of their previous works in part because it shifts focus from nudity and self mutilation to biblical stories and also because it represents a collaborative effort with multiple other filmmakers.

Unlike traditional anthologies, the various parts aren’t clearly segmented by filmmaker and instead flow into each other with brief text on screen sometimes indicating the switch to a different segment. The presentation is a real variety of mixed media from static collage imagery accompanied by discordant and distorted soundscapes to live action scenes and old silent film footage reworked and reedited into Found Art style segments. This does make for a bit of an uneven tone as the highly produced black and white scene from Marian Dora (Melancholie der Engel) presents a much more professional tone than some of the less successful live action segments whose costumes and camerawork have a much more DIY aesthetic to them.

This collection is on a whole a very interesting and unconventional piece of artistic expression but is at its least successful when it leans into an over-reliance of on-screen text or direct voice-over to communicate the ideas presented in it. There are a lot of interesting concepts and ideas here dealing with religion, transhumanism, death, and resurrection but I would challenge Valient and the other artists to rely on their talents and abilities to process these concepts through a creative filter and express them more abstractly than simply telling it to the audience. I also found the choice to include footage that was clearly filmed handheld from another screen to be curious rather than just incorporating it into the footage itself.

The times when this film is at its most successful are when it’s able to lean into the surreal and bizarre aspects and run wild with them. The make-up effects on the lepers were truly inspired and genuinely haunting but the most interesting part of this experience is without a doubt the use of the bizarre collage imagery. The use of this creative technique, incorporating some moving images into a mostly static scene, coupled with distorted audio made for a unique and intriguing experience. I also like how the old footage was recontextualized into something strange and new and there were points that were reminiscent of early Lynch shorts and the kind of dark anatomical visuals Marilyn Manson used during his most provocative period. The time-lapse decomposition also brought to mind Peter Greenaway’s deeply unsettling masterpiece A Zed and Two Naughts.

Ultimately, a bit of a mixed bag as collaborations typically are, there are moments of experimental brilliance here and a more streamlined version that pairs down the overuse of text throughout would probably be more successful. While the effectiveness of the overarching message in the film will undoubtedly depend on your personal connection to the tenets of Christianity and interest in transhumanism, I always appreciate art that takes big swings and isn’t afraid to use highly unconventional and experimental ways of expressing ideas.

Availability: Limited

Limited edition Blu-rays can be purchased at Bizarretheater.com

Mutilation Theatre (2023)

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I’ve been a fan of White Gardenia (the underground artist collective helmed by controversial performance artist Daniel Valient) for quite some time now so naturally the idea of a definitive collection of their work was very appealing to me. Mutilation Theatre combines films from previous White Gardenia collections such as Blood Tastes Like Perfume and How to Raise Women from the Dead plus substantial additional footage. The film, released by Goredrome Pictures, comes in at a hefty four and a half hours and is billed as “The Definitive Short Film Collection”, which at that length it certainly should be. It’s definitely comprehensive but as far as definitive goes we’ll talk more about that a little later.

For fans of WG, Mutilation Theatre does provide the hits and features many of my personal favorites including The Oracle at Mesopotamia, Akasha’s First Time, m.i.p.a.m.h., Mobius Strip and more. These are the kinds of films that feature White Gardenia at their best and embody the surreal, unique experience that they are known for, featuring discordant audio soundscapes, bizarre onscreen text popups, and of course, real body mutilation and blood drinking. It also kicks off with a bang featuring a short that was new to me called The Oracle at Erythaea that was a sublime piece of disturbing art and featured a startling scene where Daniel viciously nails his own hand to the table before letting Allison drink his blood. The inclusion of the unsimulated shit-play/shit-eating scene later in the collection was genuinely surprising and good to see that WG can still find new shocking avenues to explore.

When your collection is longer than the extended cut of Return of the King, you’re bound to have some ups and downs in the quality of the material. White Gardenia is strongest when they focus on their well-honed format of surreal self-mutilation but falter a bit when it comes to narrative segments. While these scenes aren’t bad, they lack the forethought and substance to make them pop and are leaning heavily on the use of unsimulated cutting, explicit sex, and occasional special effects to keep the viewer engaged. There is also a bit of culling that could have been beneficial such as the segment The Oracle at West Gate Mall (Oct 1985) which is literally nothing more than a short clip of an animatronic skeleton inside a Spirit Halloween and was clearly shot well after 1985.

It’s great that there are underground companies like Goredrome willing to put out obscure content like this but there are a few things left to be desired about the release itself. The fact that this is branded as a definitive edition yet lacks some key WG segments is pretty disappointing. We only get V.O laden clips of the infamous finger-severing/eating from A Midnite Snack and segments like Allison’s Mouth Fills with Blood and Semen and Cher Nevin’s annihilating vaginal mutilation clip Yummy Fur are entirely absent. This is most likely due to their current inclusion on the Vore Gore and XXX: Dark Web compilations but still, these are keystone WG clips and you’d think they’d find a way to get them included. It’s also downright baffling to me that this collection still includes clips that are cut-off partway through with text directing you to a website for the full, uncensored version. Isn’t the whole point of a definitive collection to present artists’ work in its uncut entirety? And if these segments aren’t archived in physical media here then it seems unlikely it will ever happen for them.

If you know me then you know there is nothing I find more obscene and distasteful than censorship, self or otherwise. To that end, I was quite surprised that a collection that features bloodplay, explicit sex, and snacking on human feces would only include the censored version of A Perfume Made from Blood and Tears. And finally, not to sound overly nitpicky but it would have been really great to have more labeled subchapters to help find individual films rather than everything being dumped into a timeline and cut into four giant segments.

Ultimately, while there is good stuff here there is also room for improvement. The issue isn’t the content so much as the presentation that’s undermining it. We have yet to obtain a truly definitive gold-standard release of the work of White Gardenia but this is still a solid and comprehensive collection and a great way to dive in headfirst and experience the provocative, disturbing and thoroughly unique art they have created.

Availability: Limited

Limited copies are available from Goredrome.com while supplies last.

The Art of Self Harm (2023)

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“One of the most disturbing documentaries ever made” a quote attributed to no one confidently proclaims at the top of the cover art. It’s a bold move to state this about your own film rather than waiting for others to bestow it upon you, but when the subject of your documentary is White Gardenia, a performance art collective that is literally on the cutting edge of underground Extreme Cinema you may have good cause to. So, does The Art of Self Harm live up to this proclamation or is it a hyperbolic marketing tactic? We’ll get more into this in a minute.

White Gardenia has been growing in prominence within the underground community thanks to limited edition compilations of their work like Blood Tastes Like Perfume and How to Raise Women from the Dead entering the marketplace along with segments in other collections such as XXX: Dark Web and Vore Gore. Defining exactly who is and isn’t officially part of the group can be a little murky as multiple people will pop in and out of videos, but the mainstays are Cherokee Nevin, Allison Belmont, and of course the ringleader himself, Daniel Valient. Much like the members themselves, the work of White Gardenia isn’t easily defined by strict labels or categorization but can most broadly be described as surreal short films that utilize music and unsimulated self-mutilation to create a unique and provocative experience for the viewer.

With The Art of Self Harm filmmaker Jonathan Doe (a prominent underground artist in his own right known for such films as The Degenerates, Barf Bunny, and Defilement of a Porcelain Doll) gains unprecedented access to the group, interviewing the key members and digging into WG’s backstory as well as some of their more notorious scenes. He even goes a step further and becomes part of the story himself when he films a new scene for them where Cherokee nails Daniel’s scrotum to a table in service of making a shall we say, “unconventional” candelabra.

The doc itself doesn’t really have a thesis statement nor does it delve too extensively into how this particular kind of outsider art fits into the larger cultural context but not every documentarian needs to be Ken Burns or Errol Morris. What it does offer is an intimate look at the people behind this provocative art and give context and additional information that even a long-time fan such as myself was unaware of. Whether its finding out the dark origin of the White Gardenia name, how the group shifted their focus from music creation to extreme performance art or just to see the “death pit” where Allison meditates amongst the corpses of various animals, this provides a lot of interesting info that fans are sure to appreciate. Daniel chooses to obscure his face in the interviews (even though it is on full display in the numerous clips that are intercut throughout) but is revealing in other ways as he further expands on his personal philosophy and motivation that he had only previously touched on in various clips in the past.

It’s not just the conversation that may be earning this film its distinction as a particularly disturbing documentary, as there are also numerous clips that those not desensitized by years of viewing Extreme Cinema may find hard to endure. Aside from the aforementioned candelabra piece, Doe also includes clips of classic White Gardenia segments including the notorious Midnite Snack from XXX: Dark Web where Daniel severs his own finger before he and Allison cook and taste it. It also includes the Yummy Fur segment from Vore Gore and Doe interviews Cherokee about what it was like to cut off a piece of her own labia and devour it.

There’s a lot of very interesting content within The Art of Self Harm for WG fans to…chew on if you will, but one more noteworthy parts that I found particularly intriguing was the behind-the-scenes controversy that XXX: Dark Web caused which even went so far as to involve the police. Yes, just like Ruggero Deodato was for Cannibal Holocaust and Hideshi Hino for Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood, the members of White Gardenia were reported to the authorities for their involvement in the collection and had to prove that no one was in fact killed in any of the clips. I actually commend how reasonable the Montana police department was in their handling of this situation but the thought of three officers having to sit in a room and closely watch the entirety of XXX: Dark Web really puts a twisted smile on my face.

So, does The Art of Self Harm earn its self-appointed distinction? It really depends on your particular threshold for certain kinds of content and with films like Africa Addio, Orozco the Embalmer, Earthlings, Night and Fog, etc there are quite a few pushing the envelope in that category. That being said, I feel you would be hard-pressed to find someone who could reasonably disagree with the fact that a film with this much uncensored physical mutilation is indeed one of the most disturbing documentaries ever made.

Availability: Upcoming Release

Film will be officially for sale through Putrid Productions on November 18th, 2023 but is currently available for pre-order.

How to Raise Women from the Dead (2021)

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Mutilation performance artist/musician Daniel Valient is back with another batch of twisted videos from his band White Gardenia. While Blood Tastes Like Perfume was more of a standard collection of the kind of videos fans of the band would expect to find (and may have already seen online) How to Raise Women from the Dead takes a big swing with some new content and goes in a very different direction. In art, taking risks is often necessary for growth but is also inherently a gamble, so lets discuss to what degree it did (or did not) pay off in this case.

The first disc in this two disc set is the Blu-ray featuring four separate videos on the main menu. The primary draw here is the short The Secret Perfume of Decay which marks Valient’s first foray into proper narrative storytelling as a director. This departure from the more abstract and experimental work that White Gardenia is known for is part of the risk I was referring too but ultimately was not nearly as significant a change as the other videos would end up being. These are experimental in a whole different way as all three of them are comprised of a series of static images with audio clips playing over them that discussed transhumanism and the singularity in depth with a particular focus on the scientist Frank J Tipler.

For the uninitiated, the concept of transhumanism ultimately boils down to a philosophical and intellectual movement based around the goal of conquering death through advanced technology. The singularity is the hypothetical point at which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, becomes self-aware, and creates an irreversible and uncontrollable change that permanently alters the course of humanity. If this is a subject that interests you then you may find these segments to be informative and enlightening but if not then watching them feels a lot like being cornered by a belligerent family member who is dead-set on converting you to their religion. This is certainly a rich topic to explore but it would have been better done through some kind of artistic interpretation rather than an information dump of raw audio interviews.

On the other hand, in The Secret Perfume of Decay Valient does a good job portraying the story of a nameless serial killer and his most recent victim, both played by uncredited actors. The short still features Gardenia’s trademark self-mutilation, off-kilter tone, and a very interesting appearance by Valient himself which was the highlight of the whole experience. I also enjoyed learning about the real-world practice of re-creating paper mâché busts of unknown victims in the 60’s and 70’s which lead to some incredibly uncanny and downright creepy results. While very different in form from the other shorts it is still tied to them thematically as transhumanist views of death and resurrection play heavily into the story. My only major complaint here is Valient’s over reliance on text cards when he would have been better served following the classic “show don’t tell” rule of filmmaking.

The other disc in pack is labeled as “Extras Disc” and in a bewildering formatting choice features another copy of TSPoD which has been unceremoniously dumped onto an auto-play DVD with no menu, rewind or chapter separation along with ten other Gardenia films. I’m very pleased at the inclusion of these films as this is the first time any of them have been released onto physical media but am confused why they weren’t featured prominently on the main disc with the long form audio interviews more fittingly relegated to the extras section.

While I did like TSPoD, the real gem of this collection is the inclusion of some classic WG shorts that I absolutely adore. Films like (m.i.p.a.m.h, Mobius Strip and Video for Teilhard de Chardin) exemplify White Gardenia at its best, showcasing the surreal, abstract and disturbing content they are known for. These are the kind of deeply unsettling, genuinely strange videos that feel like something you would wander into in the darker corners of the internet and help to make up for the inclusion of some overly tepid BDSM and the absolutely egregious inclusion of the censored version (!) of A Perfume Made from Blood and Tears. In short, the disc is a mix of highs and lows which is an apt description of the overall collection itself but in both cases there is enough great content to be found within to make it well worth having in your collection.

Availability: Limited

Limited copies of the two disc set are available https://www.abaroquehouse.com while supplies last.

Blood Tastes Like Perfume: The Short Films of White Gardenia (2021)

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When watching an experimental film it’s important to meet the movie on its own terms and view it through that lens. There seems to be a knee-jerk impulse in mainstream culture to immediately label films without a conventional narrative as nonsensical, images of violence as gratuitous, and unsimulated sex as pornographic. This kind of thinking is incredibly reductive and limiting, especially when art in other mediums such as paint and sculpture are more frequently praised as “bold” and “daring” for containing similar depictions. Artists should be free to use any item in their toolkit to make a creative expression that is genuine for them and true artistic freedom means anything and everything that happens between consenting adults must be allowed to be expressed. Art that pushes boundaries must be approached with an open mind and a strong stomach and it is with that mindset that I evaluate the unconventional, provocative collection that is Blood Tastes Like Perfume: The Short Films of White Gardenia.

The band White Gardenia is headed by musician Daniel Valient and are well known in certain underground circles for their shocking fetishistic mutilation and blood drinking short films that are underscored with their original music. White Gardenia’s work primarily exists online but has been featured in some films that received a physical media release such as XXX: Dark Web and Vore Gore, both of which were put out by Tetro Video. Blood Tastes Like Perfume marks the first time the band has received a proper home video release on their own (this time courtesy of Bizarre Theatre) and the collection features eight of their videos including Blood is Sweeter than Honey, Akasha Drinking my Blood, and A Perfume Made From Blood and Tears.

The most pertinent question here is how well this collection works as a showcase for the work of White Gardenia. While this is by no means a complete collection of their work, the eight shorts do provide a solid representation of what White Gardenia is all about and gives viewers a glimpse into their twisted world. Still, I was a little disappointed by the omission of their most provocative film (and my personal favorite) A Midnite Snack which was one of the segments featured in XXX: Dark Web. What stuck out the most as a strange choice as far as the Blu-ray release itself goes however was the occasional references to additional White Gardenia videos online that appeared after some films. I understand the thought process here but the biggest problem with the execution (aside from sometimes neglecting to put in the web address) was that the text after one film advised that “full and uncensored” clips can be found online. Given the explicit nature of the scenes that are shown, the film is clearly not censored for content but that message seems to imply that some of the most interesting parts may be missing. Fans shelling out for a Blu-ray release like this should feel like they are getting the definitive collection, not a tease for more info that has to be found through a series of confusing links. It’s not clear at this point if there will be additional volumes released with more of White Gardenia’s output but if this is to be the only physical release then it is a glaring oversight to not include all the best, nastiest content in its full and uncensored glory.

Like any short film collection the quality varies from film to film as some are inevitably more compelling than others. The couple of bondage themed scenes that were included were actually the least interesting part of the collection as the scenes felt quite tepid and restrained for BDSM play and were further weakened by their juxtaposition to the far more intense scenes of real cutting and blood drinking. Even though it may have been a little repetitive I would have still preferred the inclusion of some of their other cutting and blood play videos in lieu of these to have a more cohesive and consistent experience.

Where this collection really shines is in its ability to showcase boundary-pushing art as Daniel and the rest of the performers go to extreme levels to create spectacle that is beyond the limits of what you will find in most films. Aesthetically, there are some strange choices such as including flubs and outtakes that could have been easily trimmed out but they do have a way of adding to the gritty, cinéma-vérité style of the production. The minimum production values of the scenes where shaky hand-held footage reveals genuine mutilation and blood drinking add to the dangerous, provocative feeling of voyeuristically consuming taboo acts that are shunned within mainstream society.

Another thing I really appreciate about this film is that it is far from simply being a collection of shocking content created to illicit a cheap reactionary response. There is a genuine surreal quality to the footage (especially when consumed all in one sitting) that make for an engaging and unique experience. This is thanks it large part to White Gardenia’s experimental and at times wonderfully discordant music and sound design that underscore most of the film. It is also due to some fantastic editing choices that heighten and enhance the scenes in very interesting ways. Probably my favorite moment occurred in Akasha Drinking my Blood when a constructed shot resulted in a scene so minimalist yet so perfectly unsettling that it felt straight out of Lynch’s Inland Empire. So, in the end while it’s not a perfect release, it is still a damn good one and will provide viewers with a unique experience that is provocative, unsettling and legitimately boundary-pushing.

Availability: Limited

Blu-rays can only be purchased through bizarretheater.com while supplies last. Not available to stream.