Cremaster 2

Not since Warhol has a visual artist made movies as masterfully as Matthew Barney. "Cremaster" describes a muscle in the testicles, and Barney's career-long subjects--masculinity and the biological, rather than societal, roots of male behavior--are given a hypnotic treatment here. Barney organizes the movie as rigorously as if it were an argument; but rather than rhetoric the movie is powered by dream logic. For an image such as the soon-to-be-killed gas-station attendant sniffing around Gary Gilmore's car--two sixties beauties joined with a mass of canvas like Siamese-twin mutants--you'd have to go back to the top shelves of Kenneth Anger and David Lynch. Filled with genital prostheses and heebie-jeebie-giving hive imagery, CREMASTER 2 has a hidden, hivelike structure that suggests a way out of out post-MTV, post-web-surfing image surplus. Barney has at times seemed a preening poseur; CREMASTER 2 reveals him as focussed in his private ecstasies as Cocteau.

There is a lot that could be said and a lot that will continue to surface about this film, and I have not even seen the others in the series.

The film is simply staggering. I always see movies cold, with little or no knowledge of the sometimes pretentious "concept" behind the film, but for this film Cocteau is a great reference. The cinematography is a worthy tribute to Kubrick's early style. It is clear that there is sophisticated and complex metaphor embedded throughout the film, though it's not as pretentiously baffling as say, Tarkovsky's "Sacrifice". I have to grudgingly recommend that one should see the website for an overview of cremaster 2 to fully appreciate the sequence, if not the brilliant execution, because in cremaster 2, writer/director Matthew Barney shows a gift for making stunning, almost schizophrenic connections among wildly disconnected stories which are each revolutionary even when taken alone. If you can stay with the film, the dawning of their connections is devastating.

I apparently saw Cremaster 1 and then 2 shown together which was actually even better, especially without the benefit of knowing they were separate films. Cremaster 1, which is like Kubrick's best work- beautifully minimalistic, quietly disturbing, seductive and surreal. It's also completely disconnected from the essential sequence of cremaster 2 so it serves to provoke imagination and destroy conceptual barriers before cremaster 2 starts. The sequence starts with the pristine, amorphous canvas of cremaster1, then becomes gradually more coherent in some unknown direction, and finally crystallizes into an almost tangible object. There is not a normal conclusion or an ending. The separate stories form an object. A beautiful, complete and complex object.

The film is truly working at all levels, and I believe it manages to break new ground conceptually. I consider it a genuine modern surrealist masterpiece, somewhat in the vein of Kubrick.

Barney is starting to drive me crazy. It would be simple if he were worthless, but he isn't.

Where I stand: I'm watching the Cremasters in numeric sequence and have seen number one. I've also seen two other projects. In half of the four, I felt rewarded. He's a bit too much preoccupied with notation than form, disconcerting in a sculptor, but "Drawing Restraint" and "Cremaster 1" had moments that were transcendent. The projects as whole compositions collapsed under their heft, but when they impressed, they really did.

Where he gets into trouble is when he tries to impose narrative. You can be visually strong in terms of pure form. Or you can be narratively strong using cinematic form, which is visual in a different way. He understand the first and is wholly incompetent in the second. Unfortunately here he "has something to say." Fragments of actual stories appear where they were avoided in the other projects.

Lynch knows how to do this. Medem. Tarkovsky. Its what I call the long form and it requires an understanding of whole realms not just bits from them.

Stay away from this one. It fails and the collapse is uninteresting.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

The Cremaster Cycle 9/10

The Cremaster Cycle is a series of five films shot over eight years. Although they can be seen individually, the best experience is seeing them all together (like Wagner's Ring Cycle) - and also researching as much as you can beforehand. To give you an idea of the magnitude, it has been suggested that their fulfilment confirms creator Matthew Barney as the most important American artist of his generation (New York Times Magazine).

The Cremaster films are works of art in the sense that the critical faculties you use whilst watching them are ones you might more normally use in, say, the Tate Modern, than in an art house cinema. They are entirely made up of symbols, have only the slimmest of linear plots, and experiencing them leaves you with a sense of awe, of more questions and inspirations than closed-book answers. The imagery is at once grotesque, beautiful, challenging, puzzling and stupendous. Any review can only hope to touch on the significance of such an event, but a few clues might be of interest, so for what it's worth ...

Starting with the title. The 'Cremaster' is a muscle that acts to retract the testes. This keeps the testes warm and protected from injury. (If you keep this in mind as you view the piece it will be easier to find other clues and make sense of the myriad allusions to anatomical development, sexual differentiation, and the period of embryonic sexual development - including the period when the outcome is still unknown. The films, which can be viewed in any order (though chronologically is probably better than numerically) range from Cremaster 1 (most 'ascended' or undifferentiated state) to Cremaster 5 (most 'descended'). The official Cremaster website contains helpful synopses.)

Cremaster 2 is told as a gothic western and corresponds to that phase of fetal development when sexual division begins. It features such different images as a classic car in a service station, Bronco-busting cowboys, swarms of bees, a Texan two-step and music ranging from a capella singing to a heavy rock band. Houdini reappears (played by Norman Mailer) and is asked a question about metamorphosis - rather than maintain a position within the 'beehive', does he truly metamorphose and become one with the cage?

The Guggenheim Museum (which houses a parallel exhibition) describes the Cremaster Cycle as "a self-enclosed aesthetic system consisting of five feature-length films that explore processes of creation." As film, the Cremaster Cycle is one to experience in the cinema if you have the opportunity to do so, or to experience and re-experience at leisure on DVD (the boxed set is promised for late 2004 and will be a gem for lovers of art-cinema fusion).

I wish I could have liked this art film more. It starts out with eerie synthesizer washes over shots of mysterious landscapes, really hooking in the viewer. Then there are some strange goings-on with a couple, an older woman, and some insects in a house. However, it becomes a weird mishmash of some sort of link between murderer Gary Gilmore and writer Norman Mailer, and is largely incomprehensible, but not in an entertaining way. I looked at my watch about four times, and nearly fell asleep. 6 out of 10.