Rolled out for Matt Barney's 3-hour wordless experimental art museum installation film knowing next to nothing about the guy or the rest of his Cremaster Cycle beyond a cursory Google search where I learned he was a football player turned catalog model turned visual/video art Jodorowsky-esque provocateur who has a kid with Björk, and that the project is named after a testicular muscle. So I went into this with the expectation and anticipation that my favorite part was going to be how much motherfucking sense it all made... And lo and behold!

Anyway, this is filled with essentially nonstop vivid surrealist imagery cross-cut together with a meditative rhythm and hypnotic soundscape that weaves together fashion, myth, anatomy, geometry and seems to a draw a line between the architectural/sculptural act of creation with the existential reality of our world as one big gruesome and strange digestive system. The broad "story" if I had to guess seems to be about some sort Freemason's apprentice (played by Barney himself) who attempts to climb and contribute to the building process of Chrysler building in a way that symbolically relates to the artist-immigrant experience, and a larger sense of cultural assimilation/transformation where American traditions are made physical, tangible, biological, athletic... Early images of Irish landscapes and ancient giants giving way to an old-timey car demolition derby loaded with a corpse enger, an extended sequence of elevator's being used to create music to a slapstick bartender trying to pour glasses of Guinness and a model trying to chop potatoes with her heels and some 1930s gangster meet-up at a foggy horse-race track with zombie horses.

And that's before going to intermission (where there had to have been at least a dozen or two walk-outs during), after which he turns it up a notch with a dentistry body horror sequence where Barney has his teeth smashed in and asshole prolapsed (the cut from the crumpled car part being shoved in his bloody mouth to the close-up of his butthole generated a legit gasp), a gargantuanly-scaled Maypole ribbon dance atop the Chrysler building, and a final hour that he describes as a video game rendition of the entire Cremaster Cycle called The Order. Where you see Barney himself dripped out with the performance art look you see here on the poster, literally climbing the multi-level Guggenheim spiral ramp rotunda trying to complete obstacle course tasks around bunny-eared tap-dancing chorus girls and Nazi punk mosh pits and Paralympic athlete Aimee Mullins as a full-on prosthetic creature cat woman, eventually making his way to abstract sculpture artist Richard Serra's "The Architect" throwing Vaseline around in a gas mask?? Quite literally never seen anything else remotely like this, and I'm not even 100% sure if I'm saying that as a positive or negative thing but I can honestly say I was never bored or unstimulated.

[35mm]