Cremaster 2

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.

Cremaster 2 is one of the strongest -- I won't say best because the 5 films are "best" taken as a whole -- but one of the strongest and most challenging episodes of the series. To say that the film is numbing is not really the point -- everyone has their own idiosyncratic negative reactions to some part or other of the series -- the music in Cremaster 1, for example, drove me crazy. One of the strong points of Cremaster 2 is that it is not as circular as the others -- the film starts in the nineteenth century and passes through Utah in the seventies and ends somewhere on a glacier -- there is linear movement. Because the story of Gary Gilmore is familiar to anyone who has read The Executioner's Song, and because this is the only film in the series that includes dialog, it is clearest in this film how and why Barney is breaking down the tradition narrative form. Thus, because this film uses traditional art elements -- and borrows from another work of art (Mailer) -- Barney is actually working from a more limited (and conventional) palette and is not just "out there" in a universe completely of his own making. The effect is devastating. The Executioner's Song was not entirely about Gilmore either, it was meant to confer some kind of broad idea about American masculinity and working class frustration. The book was considered groundbreaking when it came out, it did not fit into any conventional non-fiction format. Barney shatters the old forms of biography and destiny even more. Someday people will understand Barney better -- that he is not breaking with narrative conventions because he wants to, but because he has to. This is a deep film about nature and conflict and it is not necessary to be fluent in "Barnese" to get it. It is important to not let Barney be hijacked by movie criticism -- he is actually much more relevant to literary and visual art traditions, which are older traditions and the ones with which Barney is engaged in dialog. Not film...

I only gave this a six, because it was a painful movie to sit through at the time, and I found myself very bored, frustrated, and begging the film to end. But as the film gestates in my mind I've been able to select the moments that did stick with me, and so I may see it again if the entire series is ever released on DVD and change my mind about the film. It made an impression, and that's more than can be said of most movies.

Barney continues his Vaseline-fetish, and I'm not sure what he intends it to represent, if anything, but where in the first "Cremaster" they seemed to exist as molds, the same way the women existed as identical objects from the same mold, here it's much more sexual in nature: when we see Gilmore smother two balls with Vaseline we can't take our eyes away; it's not sexy, but it's certainly sensual (if a malleable inanimate object can be called sensual). That soulless, cold sex is depicted physically with the robotic sex we see from below, where it looks like bees procreating.

There are a lot of individual moments that don't seem to have any relation to one another, but stick with you regardless: cowboy line dancing, a woman at a seance who toes a cowbell, Gilmore being sentenced by Mounties to ride a bull, men in a giant boardroom, and the scene with two of the most famous death metal musicians playing incarnations of Johnny Cash. Norman Mailer, too, should be mentioned, as he's perhaps the most memorable aspect of the entire film. (I haven't read his "The Executioner's Song.") 6/10

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.

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.