Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle 1 - 5

Whatever you may think of Matthew Barney's curious post-industrial aesthetic, his predilection for artificiality, deformity, grandeur, and fabulous shoes, his Cremaster Cycle (of five films) is an extraordinary cinematic experiment which must be viewed on the big screen to be appreciated, certainly, but also to be seen at all, since none of the films are available on DVD. With this in mind, note dates and times of The Roxie's upcoming screenings of all five films plus Barney's latest De Lama Lamina, a mechanical-erotic-carnivalesque piece referencing the crisis of deforestation in Brazil, Afro-Brazilian deities and our own local hero Julia Butterfly Hill, and featuring the music of Arto Lindsay playing live at the Carnivale de Salvador in Bahia. I have only seen Cremaster 1 and Cremaster 5; the whole cycle is said to develop in much greater depth and symbolic complexity the themes sketched in these two films, themes which have mostly to do with differentiation of the sexes, or an imagined blissful state before differentiation takes place; the struggle to return to this state of bliss before the testes of the male are fully descended (something effected by the cremaster muscle - hence the title), which drama is enacted in a variety of rituals including sports-themed contests, operas, enactments of Celtic myth, Busby-Berkeley style musicals and beauty pageants, with Manx giants, queens, magicians, air-hostesses, Mormons, Masons, opera singers, murderers, satyrs, and water nymphs, not to mention Norman Mailer (as Harry Houdini), Richard Serra (as architect of Solomon's Temple and the Chrysler Building), and Ursula Andress (as the original 'Queen of Chain'); the delirious and bizarre array of surreally-linked objects, costumes and gestures featured therein are so out-of-this-world, so unusual and delightful to contemplate it is tempting to just fill pages with lists of them, which would be easier than writing a serious analysis and something most reviewers of Cremaster tend to do. It's inevitable - the sheer proliferation of symbolic images in these films just knocks you out - but Barney has clearly meditated at great length on the meaning of his narrative segments and their symbolic manifestations, as evidenced by his emphasis on shapes that recur throughout, on themes of ascension and descension which are continuously and variously developed, themes of biological and sexual necessity, of struggle, and circularity, and return ... what we see unfolding before us is essentially the imaginal, metaphoric dreamworld of an artist contemplating his own - and I mean this in a nice way - navel, which is to say, the real ground zero in his struggle with biological imperative as fate. Cremaster 1, shortest film in the cycle at 41 minutes, establishes the gender-differentiation theme with its evocation of pre-differentiated balance or wholeness, envisioned as a state of bliss choreographed by an indolent blonde goddess who exists simultaneously in two airships which float above the Bronco stadium in Boise, Idaho, Barney's hometown; her arrangements and rearrangements of grapes correspond to the movements of a huge synchronised chorus of girls on the blue astroturf below. It's a light, bright, musical piece with only the slightest hint of danger at the edges, easily grasped, despite its trademark peculiarities, because the central metaphor has not yet undergone the intense diversification that marks the rest of the cycle. Cremaster 5 is darker, grander, and more romantic, a fascinating contemplation of descent into duality as a form of transcendence itself, a visual and aural feast filmed in the twilit city of Budapest, in the Hungarian State Opera House, and in the Gellert Baths, starring Ursula Andress as the black-clad Queen of Chain, a sort of operatic diva whose tortured memory of her lost lover, played by Barney in various guises, re-enacts his ritual suicide and symbolic descent. Scenes of great beauty and startling originality which are frankly astonishing to behold, accompanied by a full operatic libretto (in Magyar) and score from the brilliant Jonathon Bepler, whose original music accompanies the entire series, make this one of the most unusual and memorable things I've ever seen onscreen. More than one critic has compared the cycle to Wagner's Ring, and Barney's manipulation of grand themes, magisterial landscapes of the mind and bold, heavy, myth-inflected images which develop in some sort of absolute time, aeons or possibly eternity itself, are almost Wagnerian in scope. To be able to achieve such a thing and to root it firmly in our own age, which he does primarily through his modern, weird aesthetic, is quite a feat - if I had not seen Cremaster 5, I wouldn't have believed such a thing possible without it collapsing into a bombastic mess. The ironies implied in staging full mythic themes (complete with gods and heroes) in contemporary terms are acknowledged as visual and musical refrains which gird the films against ridicule, but the irony is delicate and goes nowhere near cynicism - quite the opposite - Cremaster is unapologetically grand and passionate stuff. It really has to be seen to be believed. Series starts Friday, July 30 at the Roxie. Here's the trailer -