Quote:
In 2007, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler began a new collaborative project inspired by American author Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel Ancient Evenings, set in pharaonic Egypt. The project was conceived as a nontraditional opera with a series of one-time-only live acts performed across the American landscape over a five-year period. This opera developed as a film titled River of Fundament, which combines documentation of the three live acts with scenes set in a reconstruction of Norman Mailer’s brownstone apartment in Brooklyn Heights.

Barney and Bepler reimagine Mailer as his own protagonist who reincarnates three times in three different bodies by magically entering the womb of his wife Hathfertiti. In his attempt at rebirth, Norman must endure the departure of his soul’s seven mythological states: the ren or secret name; the sekhem or power; the khu or light; the ba or spirit; the ka or double; the khabit or shadow; and finally the sekhu, or remains. With each incarnation the undead Norman emerges from a river of feces that runs beneath his Brooklyn Heights apartment and enters his own wake.

Imagined as a memorial gathering attended by figures in the New York literary world, the wake takes place inside the Mailer apartment as it is ferried down the river. Guests eulogize Mailer and offer condolences to his widow, while musicians tune and begin play their instruments. Norman’s widow and a chorus of guests contemplate the soul’s journey as a series of recitatives. As the evening wears on, the wake gives way to a scene of carousing and revelry, in which characters from Ancient Evenings play out their incestuous struggles for power and their insatiable appetite for pleasure as the music gains momentum. Each incarnation of Norman joins the wake for a time, haunting the guests and challenging the ancient undead figures of gods and demigods. He endures two rebirths but fails to be reborn a third time, thus ending his attempt to ascend to a higher, more powerful state. Barney and Bepler have adopted critic Harold Bloom’s suggestion that Ancient Evenings was a thinly-disguised allegory for Mailer’s literary ambition. The powerful pharaoh Usermare evokes the spirit of Ernest Hemingway and engages Norman’s three incarnations in a struggle for dominance.

In a parallel narrative, River of Fundament replaces the body of Norman with the body of an automobile in the American landscape. Three generations of American cars act as vehicles that carry the narrative: a 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperial (known for its crashworthiness) is transmogrified into a 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am (known as the last high-performance engine of the original muscle-car generation) and finally into a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor (known for its tireless service in the U.S. government fleet).

The automobiles’ story begins with REN, a live performance staged at a car dealership in south Los Angeles. A 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperial undergoes its first death and is prepared for rebirth as a 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. The second performance, KHU, unfolds along the River Rouge and Detroit River. KHU brings the Chrysler back to its birthplace Detroit, a city rich in minerals, iron, and limestone, built upon the vast expanses of salt beds beneath Michigan. KHU sees the Chrysler Imperial dismembered and melted in five monumental furnaces. BA, the final live act, takes place at locations along New York City’s East River, culminating in a battle at a dry dock in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. At the conclusion of BA, the automobile is further transformed into the 2001 Ford Crown Victoria.

Set amid the American landscape, River of Fundament uses the language of modern industrial processing and recycling to tell the story of its automobile protagonist, alongside characters deployed from CREMASTER 3 (the Entered Apprentice and Entered Novitiate) and the Egyptian pantheon activated by Mailer (Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys, Horus, Anubis, and Khepera). The mythologies inherent to these characters are met at each site with a set of local mythologies, symbolisms, and indigenous musical traditions as diverse as Native American, American, Mayan, and Celtic. Each performance employs local talent, while the set of characters inherent to CREMASTER 3 and Egyptian mythology continue to evolve and reappear, pervading the transformation of the automobile protagonist as it endures the seven soul states toward the journey of its three embodiments.

Sculpture is generated with each transformation of the automobile. The recurring motif of a graduated ascent to power is articulated in the material language of the metals and minerals that take form in sculpture. Base elements — zinc, sulfur, iron, copper — give way to yellow metal alloys — bronze and brass — that emulate, but fail to reproduce, the quality of gold.

River of Fundament is characterized by musical performances directed according to the logic of the narrative: the story unfolds sculpturally, cinematically, and musically. Bepler uses speech and ambient rhythms as compositional elements, in addition to more traditionally-scored arias and recitatives. Sounds inherent to the landscape or action become part of the musical texture of the film, such that the setting itself becomes a musical instrument. The site-responsive nature of the music is also developed through the use of local musicians, both professional and amateur, whose performances further establish a sense of place in each scene.

Primarily excerpted from Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, the libretto also includes historical rites from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and The Pyramid Texts, along with texts from American authors Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William S. Burroughs, offering a confluence of meditations on the timeless concerns of mortality and regeneration.

7.89GB | 5h 18m | 2048×1080 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/BAE0A1626125D15/River_of_Fundament_Act_1.mkv https://nitro.download/view/0D66AD7837C4C3C/River_of_Fundament_Act_2.mkv https://nitro.download/view/9854E4CAFF2A73F/River_of_Fundament_Act_3.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Matthew Barney – River of Fundament (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Cremaster 4 adheres most closely to the project’s biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system’s onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion – three identical armored legs revolving around a central axis. Set on the Isle of Man, the film absorbs the island’s folklore as well as its more recent incarnation as host to the Tourist Trophy motorcycle race. Myth and machine combine to narrate a story of candidacy, which involves a trial of the will articulated by a series of passages and transformations. The film comprises three main character zones. The Loughton Candidate (played by Barney) is a satyr with two sets of impacted sockets in his head – four nascent horns, which will eventually grow into those of the mature, Loughton Ram, an ancient breed native to the island. Its horns – two arcing upward, two down – form a diagram that proposes a condition of undifferentiation, with ascension and descension coexisting in equilibrium. The second and third character zones comprise a pair of motorcycle sidecar teams: the Ascending and Descending Hacks. These primary characters are attended to by a trio of fairies who mirror the three narrative fields occupied by the Candidate and the two racing teams. Having no volition of their own, these creatures metamorphose in accordance with whatever field they occupy at any given time.

785MB | 42mn 16s | 720×540 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/8A7E63CC492B310/Cremaster_4_%281995%29_–_Matthew_Barney.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Matthew Barney – Cremaster 4 (1995) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character – host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect (played by Richard Serra), and the Entered Apprentice (played by Barney), who are both working on the building. They are reenacting the Masonic myth of Hiram Abiff, purported architect of Solomonâ€s Temple, who possessed knowledge of the mysteries of the universe. The murder and resurrection of Abiff are reenacted during Masonic initiation rites as the culmination of a three-part process through which a candidate progresses from the first degree of Entered Apprenticeship to the third of Master Mason.

2.42GB | 3h 0mn | 853×480 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/62087277BEF12A2/Cremaster.3.2002.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Matthew Barney – Cremaster 3 (2002) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Cremaster 2 is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney’s abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1. Cremaster 2 embodies this regressive impulse through its looping narrative, moving from 1977, the year of Gary Gilmore’s execution, to 1893, when Harry Houdini, who may have been Gilmore’s grandfather, performed at the World’s Columbian Exposition. The film is structured around three interrelated themes – the landscape as witness, the story of Gilmore (played by Barney), and the life of bees—that metaphorically describe the potential of moving backward in order to escape one’s destiny.

1.60GB | 1h 19mn | 847×458 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/89DACBBB10DCAFF/Cremaster.2.1999.NTSC.DVD.x264.AC3.2.0-ZN.mkv

Language:No dialogue
Subtitles:none

The post Matthew Barney – Cremaster 2 (1999) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Cremaster 1 is a musical revue performed on the blue Astroturf playing field of Bronco Stadium in Boise, Idaho – Barney’s hometown. Two Goodyear Blimps float above the arena like the airships that often transmit live sporting events via television broadcast. Four air hostesses tend to each blimp. The only sound is soft ambient music, which suggests the hum of the engines. In the middle of each cabin interior sits a white-clothed table, it’s top decorated with an abstract centerpiece sculpted from Vaseline and surrounded by clusters of grapes. In one blimp the grapes are green, in the other they are purple. Under both of these otherwise identical tables resides Goodyear (played by Marti Domination). Inhabiting both blimps simultaneously, this doubled creature sets the narrative in motion. After prying an opening in the tablecloth(s) above her head, she plucks grapes from their stems and pulls them down into her cell. With these grapes, Goodyear produces diagrams that direct the choreographic patterns created by a troupe of dancing girls on the field below. The camera switches back and forth between Goodyear’s drawings and aerial views of the chorus girls moving into formation: their designs shift from parallel lines to the figure of a barbell, from a large circle to an outline of splitting and multiplying cells, and from a horizontally divided field emblem (Barney’s signature motif) to a rendering of an undifferentiated reproductive system (which marks the first six weeks of fetal development). Gliding in time to the musical score, the chorus girls delineate the contours of a still-androgynous gonadal structure, which echoes the shapes of the two blimps overhead, and symbolizes a state of pure potential.

801MB | 40mn 32s | 720×540 | mkv

http://nitroflare.com/view/D7877BF170B773A/Cremaster.1.1996.NTSC.DVD.x264.AC3.2.0-ZN.mkv

Language:No dialogue
Subtitles:None

The post Matthew Barney – Cremaster 1 (1996) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Drawing Restraint 9, a film by Matthew Barney with a soundtrack composed by Björk, represents the first creative collaboration of two of the most protean, dynamic forces in music and fine art.

It is an apt pairing. Refusing to choose between pop pleasure and restless experimentation, Björk’s musical vision weds technology and emotion, countering gut-level expression with an insistence upon formal modernity and innovation.

Similarly poised, and celebrated, within the world of contemporary art as Björk is within her own field, Matthew Barney is a visual artist whose ambitious, rigorous multimedia work encodes esoteric meanings while providing lushly immediate aesthetic rewards. Best known for The Cremaster Cycle, the sprawling sequence of five films made over ten years which was the subject of a recent Guggenheim retrospective, Matthew Barney’s work is multimedia in execution but singularly focused in conception: tightly unified fusions of sculpture, performance, architecture, set design, music, computer generated effects and prosthetics, Barney’s films deploy the full range of cinematic resources in the service of a hermetic vision rich with densely layered networks of meaning drawn from mythology, history, sports, music, and biology.

The basis of Barney’s approach is an operative tension between sculpture and film: the lingering attention to sensuous detail and richly organized aesthetics lends each character, costume, artifact, set, and architectural location within his work the frozen timelessness of sculpture– yet these components are subjected to vigorous processes of radical rupture and change as the films unfold.

Drawing.Restraint.9.2009.NTSC.DVD.AC3.5.1-ZN.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2h 24mn
Size: 	2.98 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	716x478 ~> 849x478
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 500 Kbps
BPP: 	0.305
Audio
#1:  	Japanese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 Kbps (Drawing Restraint 9 (2005))

https://nitro.download/view/AA069DA9C5A64DF/Drawing.Restraint.9.2009.NTSC.DVD.x264.AC3.5.1-ZN.mkv

Language(s):Japanese, English, Icelandic
Subtitles:English (muxed)

The post Matthew Barney – Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

IMDB:
part of a modern art classic
9/10
Author: Chris_Docker from United Kingdom
20 March 2004

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

“http://www.nitroflare.com/view/E6E6688444E6CDD/matthew-barney-cremaster-5-1997-.avi

Language(s):Hungarian
Subtitles:no

The post Matthew Barney – Cremaster 5 (1997) first appeared on Cinema of the World.