Cremaster 1

It's a bit difficult to look at this film, because it's hard to figure out what it is. At first you think it's rife with symbolism, that useless tactic that can be "figured out" and then explained as great movie-making. But the way Barney forces us through long, long takes -- silent -- I think is intended to make us evaluate the images not as symbols but simply as images, and that's a lot more artistically credible, to my mind. Yes, Barney has offered up his explanation of the film as being some visual allegory of gonads and whatnot, but I think that's really only interesting from a little joke perspective. The importance of the movie is in the way it resists explanation. It's hypnotic in its way -- you could watch the dancers on the football field emulate the grape formations in the blimps above all day.

There are some really strange images we see, the women picking out grapes from underneath a table, or the molds of Vaseline atop them. But Barney isn't much of a filmmaker (there is very simple editing, and the film looks as if it was filmed in the '70s); he's an artist who happens to be using film as his medium at the moment. For this reason the film doesn't feel alive as a film -- it is cinematic, a succession of moving static images, but it's really just a bunch of posing. From the smoking fashion models and from Barney. 7/10

This is not art. This is not film. This is nothing. A whole lot of nothing. 40 minutes of nothing. It's all a big joke from a screwy artist, who apparently wants to see how much he can get away with. And the only redeeming factor is that a lot of people apparently buys into the hilarious idea that this is anything more than nothing. Anyone who's fooled into wasting their time on this garbage is a sucker, and the only one laughing is the "director" Matthew Barney.

As such, it would actually be quite interesting seeing a documentary about the snobby art-societies where this is accepted as anything more than nothing. Because what value do those who value nothing actually have themselves?

Three minutes' worth of ideas smeared out into forty. If the concept of gonads just blows your mind - if you feel that their invocation, no matter how superficial or shallow, inherently constitutes thematic depth - this is the film for you. If you're hoping for something more than mediocre choreography and a single cheap "futuristic" set for the better part of an hour, during which dancers and grapes symbolically arrange themselves into ovaries while two LITERAL sculptures of these organs sit in plastic vigil the whole time, you could at least watch any of the other Cremasters instead. Between the limited but distinctive Cremaster 4 and the ambitiously striking Cremasters 2 and 3, I expected some trajectory of development from one point to the other, but this is such a thematic and visual drop-off from Cremaster 4 that the preceding film feels retroactively like some miraculous fluke of inspiration, to say nothing of those subsequent.

"Cremaster 1" manages to be even worse than "Cremaster 4" was! It is packed with that pretentious, over the top sexual symbolism that I so utterly LOATHE! This trashy "art" film is pure eye rolling material, and, on top of that, it is pure eye closing material, because I felt like falling sleep after the first 5 minutes of this train wreck!

Despite my obvious anger against this film, there were a couple of things I liked about it. For the most part, the scenes taking place in the stadium were pretty interesting and visually appealing, and the overall set and costume design was very well done. Other than that, "Cremaster 1" was simply a tedious and obnoxious waste of time. It replaces the uncomfortable and disgusting nature of "Cremaster 4" with slow, painful boredom. As a fan of films like "Satantango", a 7 hour long black and white comic drama made up of long takes, and even "Gerry", a film that is infamous for its slowness, I thought that "Cremaster 1" was overly slow paced-and it's only 40 minutes long!

This is the most needlessly slow and stupid experimental film that I have ever seen, and I have seen quite a few experimental films that I found to be silly, but those seem like "Citizen Kane" compared to this trash!

However, I have made it my duty to watch every film in Matthew Barney's "Cremaster Cycle" in its entirety. No matter how boring or silly or obnoxious these films may be, I have committed myself to watching them! It is something I shall achieve! Go (Insert My Name Here) ! Go!

I'm going to comment on these one at a time as I see them. And I will see them in numerical order — there seems to be some difference of opinion as to what is best, but I'll work with the numbers that artist has assigned.

I come to this as someone concerned with cinematic narrative, explorations, experiments, adventures. And of course matters sexual are always worth tracing deeply.

If you don't know this, it is the first, numerically of five films that are the purest that can be termed "art" films. They aren't generally available via entertainment channels; parts of these can be viewed in a few museums. Sculptures featured in the films are sold by an art dealer who provides funding for the films. Seen commercially, the films are the context woven around the objects, a technique that in the ordinary world would be called advertising.

So starting out, there's a narrative here, the oldest one: "Buy this." Or more sensitively: "associate yourself with this in order to inherit the context we will plant in you." The film experience by itself is lovely, and if it weren't the beginning of a journey into the unknown, I would recommend it without qualification. I fear that marrying this man will bring unhappiness; there's something about giving the illusion of depth that doesn't reward serious investment. And films are always about serious investment; life is film.

What you'll see is choreography on a playing field, observed and controlled from paired blimps. More precisely and obviously the control is the hidden, newly stirring female impulse, that most female of impulses. Hidden and unacknowledged, but powerful.

All the humans we see are women. All the actions are those related to wombness, fruiting, exposing, silent weaving. You might think of it as eroticism for smart people. Pre-erotic.

What makes me hesitate in folding my dreams into this is the apparent obsession with notation. Its a dangerous thing for a sculptor to confuse shape with form. We'll see.

Meanwhile, it such a perfect notion, this business about us, the game of sex, influence from an abstract sky, ordered choreography by blind, hidden, newly stirring goddesses. Fruit.

Of the visual conventions, one is jarringly inelegant. Grapes provide the Steiner corpuscles of being here. Our twinned white goddesses purloin and internalize them, then eject or excrete them to appear as the action on the ground, skirts that vaginally speak to the world.

But where do our goddesses express these fruit? Through flares attached to the soles of one shoe. Its jarringly out of sync with everything else and one can only assume that among all the clever notions of flow, our artist couldn't imagine something more organic that stayed abstract but was connected to skin, or vessel.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.