Cremaster 1

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 1 features four air hostesses in each of two identical cabins, centrepieces sculpted from vaseline on respectively green and red grapes. An androgynous looking woman beneath each works a hole in the tablecloth and plucks grapes which direct choreographed patterns of dancing chorus girls. This seems to suggest the splitting and multiplying cells of a still androgynous gonadal system.

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).

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?

Matthew Barney's highly symbolic film is done as bizarre musical, taking place simultaneously in two twin Goodyear blimps and on a football field below. If you don't have patience with art films, you wont like this, but if you do, it's a strange film about fertility and birth. It features 1930's style choreography on a football field filled with female models dressed up as whirling dervishes, there are overhead shots of them make formations of vaginas, eggs being fertilized, and the fertilized egg subdividing. On the blimps is "Goodyear" (played by actress "Marti Domination") who crawls around on both blimps simultaneously(?) taking grapes and choreographing the dancers below. Sounds bizarre? It is, but at 40 minutes it's just about the right length and I didn't look at my watch once. Worth seeing if you're into this kind of arty stuff. 8 out of 10.

This, the first in Barney's five-part Cremaster cycle of films (but the second made; the cycle is not numbered in chronological order), blends the choreography of a Busby Berkeley musical placed in an off-kilter context, and in so doing reminded me of the Coen Brothers' movies, with the slow-paced weirdness of early David Lynch. None of the Cremaster films employ dialogue -- they are essentially visual/aural experiences. This one suffers badly from poor cinematography, on several occasions being just on the edge of going out of focus. Of course, that might have been intentional. Moreover, the print I viewed was in bad shape even though it was advertised as being "brand new." If it was, then the master it was made from must be in a sorry state indeed. There is no plot to speak of; after all, this is an "art" film, so one just has to sit back and enjoy the imagery. How one interprets it is purely subjective, of course, although the overriding emphasis on genitalia and reproduction is impossible to miss. I consider this the weakest film in the cycle, but fortunately it is relatively brief at forty minutes. Rating: 5/10.