The Cremaster Cycle

[Guest nl5xsk1]

For Boston-are Massholes, this movie is playing at the Brattle in Cambridge ... I'd never heard of it before, but it sounds pretty interesting ...

 

Visual artist Matthew Barney has been twisting minds for years with his unique mixture of surreal autobiography and myth-building but it is only now that his work is being screened in main stream theaters. Thanks due largely to the fact that he has finally completed this epic cycle of films that has been shot piecemeal over almost 10 years and largely out of order. Named for the muscle that raises and lowers the human testicles, these remarkable, stunning visions incorporate some of the most richly imaginative imagery ever committed to celluloid. Including a 30s style musical played out on two Goodyear blimps and a football field below, dental surgery, a demolition derby by vintage Chryslers, a gorgeous half-cheetah/half woman, and much, much more. The films incorporate themes of Celtic legends, classical mythology, Masonic rites, and a modern fascination with sex, death and everything in between. The CYCLE includes appearances by Norman Mailer, original Bond girl Ursula Andress, the hardcore bands Murphy's Law and Agnostic Front, sculptor Richard Serra, and, of course, the artist himself.

 

"Mr. Barney's cycle, with themes enunciated and developed and overlaid with other themes, can now be perceived as one mega-film... It's rather like watching Wagner or Robert Wilson or Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublev" and letting the imagery captivate you on its own, preverbal terms. There's time for reflection later, as the images cling stubbornly in your brain... Mr. Barney's pictures are often really brilliant, so brilliant as to be disorienting; of course, the pervasive ickiness, to use the technical term, helps in the disorientation process. This is utterly original stuff: the sleek elegance of the dirigible stewardesses in "1"; the dazzling desert and ice landscapes and bizarre Gary Gilmore enactments (although as an actor Norman Mailer is no Richard Serra) in "2"; the Houdini zombie and demolition derby, the racetrack of rotting horses, the Chrysler Building and the Guggenheim itself, the dueling Celtic giants and the extraordinary Aimee Mullins as the Cheetah Woman, all in "3"; the tap-dancing man-beast and androgynous "Faeries" and motorcycle racers with what [Guggenheim curator Nancy] Spector calls "gelatinous gonadal forms" oozing from their pockets in "4"; the Budapest Opera House and dappled Asian water sprites and the amazing image of Mr. Barney's descended testicles attached to ribbons borne by fluttering doves, from "5." – John Rockwell, The New York Times