Cremaster 5

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 5 has a Tudor feel to it. It comprises mostly a tragic opera set in Budapest. I found it the most obscure of the whole cycle and could have done with subtitles at least to capture the meaning of the opera. Complex symbols involving Houdini further complicate the work.

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 actually liked this one of the Cremaster-cycle best. The Greenawayish, lush baroque settings were fascinating. I liked the weird idea about the guy climbing around the stage during musical performance for the queen.

Of course, I can't explain WHY those images were so appealing: Barney seems to be searching a sort of subliminal, unconscious expressions of sexuality and sensuality, as they appear in pure, non-verbal forms, clothing, gestures, architecture, art... at least his synopsis for the Cremaster-cycle hints to this.

It also seems that during the making of Cremaster 5 Barney has had more money: it's done on film, it has Ursula Andress in the main role, and the camera work, design and details are more lavish than in the former ones. It's great someone's doing films like this.

The last and best installment in Matthew Barney's epically deranged five-part cycle. (OK, it was the third to be shot, but isn't that typical of Barney's approach to plot logic?) Cremaster 5 is everything you might expect from the other films, only more so - lushly operatic, wildly overblown, madly pretentious. Either hypnotic or unwatchable, depending on your frame of mind. If you've ever adored a film by Ken Russell or Alejandro Jodorowsky or Sergo Paradjanov, you may revel in the bizarre and campy world Barney creates. If not, you should run very fast in the other direction - and don't even stop to catch your breath!

Shot in the Art Nouveau splendour of the Budapest Opera House, this film stars the ever gorgeous Ursula Andress as the Queen of Chains. (Ooh, tie me up please!) Incredibly, this 60s Bond icon contributes the closest thing to acting ever seen in a Barney film. As she lip-synchs to Jonathan Bepler's luscious Mahler-esque score - in Hungarian, no less - her eyes overflow with dark seduction and tragic melancholy. As if Honeychile Ryder (the bikini-clad Venus from Dr. No) had turned into Phaedra or Medea in her not-quite old age.

Powerless to rival such splendour, Matthew Barney - tyro of the avant-garde art scene - spends his time crawling ever so slowly round the proscenium of the opera house stage. Rides through Budapest on horse-back, throws himself off a bridge into the Danube. (Does this mean there will be no Cremaster 6?) In a dazzling finale, he rises out of a swimming pool brimming with water-nymphs (and why not?) A flock of doves flutter about triumphantly, tied by long silken ribbons to his naughty bits.

If the above description makes you retch, do not go near this or any other film in the Cremaster cycle. But if your mind is ever-so-slightly warped, prepare to have it blown wide open. With the triumph of drab minimalism in so many branches of the arts, including cinema (Dogme, anyone?) Barney's work is something to savour and celebrate. If you can sit through it in the first place.

David Melville

The profound tedium of the movie is mitigated only by its pretentiousness. I spent most of the movie cringing. I am deeply embarrassed for those who claim to find some value in it. Unless you think Peter Greenaway movies suffer only from having too gripping plots, I urge you to avoid Barney's films at all costs.

Yes, the cinematography is superb, a spectacle to be sure, but to throw images at an audience, no matter how intriguing they may be, with no reference other than, "Gee, isn't this pretty, or provocative or unusual," in the end is nothing but intellectual masturbation. And if the fact that in the end all of this is inaccessible to perhaps all but the filmmaker (and I am assuming his actors and crew -- evidently Ursula Andress was interested enough to sign on for this project), isn't bad enough (those who could call it visual poetry are really stretching it, IMHO), the music never matches the opulent visuals. I got the feeling looking at some of the stunning images that Barney creates, that the music is pretty lame in comparison. Quite truthfully, I wouldn't sit through this noise if it didn't have the visuals and I wouldn't want to watch the visual more than once. It's the kind of thing kids in Film School do on their first film exercise, only they don't have the huge amount of money that evidently Barney had to get this thing put on 35mm film.

About the only positive note that I can say for this pretentious extravaganza would be that mercifully, it is under an hour. BUT, that said, remember this is only one of the CREMASTER quintology. That's right, boys and girls, there are, count 'em, five of these things. The idea that people have actually suffered through four more of this man's self-indulgence....well, I guess there is more masochism out there than meets the eye.