Cremaster 3

Screening: May 2, 5:30pm. Early start!!!!!

USA
2002

Director/Screenplay: Matthew Barney
Producers: Barbara Gladstone, Matthew Barney
Cinematography: Peter Strietmann
Editors: Matthew Barney, Christopher Seguine, Peter Strietmann
Production designer: Matthew D. Ryle
Music: Jonathan Bepler
Hiram Abiff: Richard Serra
The entered apprentice: Matthew Barney
The entered novitiate/Oonagh MacCumhail: Aimee Mullins
Cloud Club maitre'd: Paul Brady
Cloud Club barman: Terry Gillespie
Grand Masters: Mike Bocchett, David Edward Campbell, James Pantoleon, Jim Tooey
Gary Gilmore: Nesrin Karanouh
Fionn MacCumhail: Peter D. Badalamenti
Fingal: The Mighty Biggs
180 mins
35mm (1.66:1)
Certificate TBA

The scaly spire of the Chrysler Building in New York City is the summit of all dreams in Cremaster 3, the centrepiece of Matthew Barney's deliriously esoteric five-part epic cycle exploring artistic creation and destruction. Images of that spire, poking through clouds like the needled head of a giant swordfish jabbing into heaven, recur throughout this three-hour movie.

With its spiky Art Deco crown, that skyscraper is a potent symbol of demonically ambitious creativity in a film that celebrates the twin urges to build and destroy as inseparable (and irrational) compulsions. At its most powerful, the largely wordless film evokes this theme with thrilling rushes of imagery, music and visual humour.

Along with its obsessive devotion to the esoteric (especially the lore surrounding Freemasonry), Cremaster 3 exudes the fizz of a Busby Berkeley musical and the visceral excitement of a sports extravaganza. In its decidedly masculine view of artistic aspiration, it is spiritually synonymous with strenuous athletic competition and a rage for order, in which all things are named, numbered, ranked.
Cremaster 3 is the largest and final piece in a cycle that was filmed out of order (4, 1, 5, 2, 3) beginning in 1994 and that has already been canonised as a major work of contemporary fine art. Until now the series has remained an art-world phenomenon outside the consciousness of the moviegoing public. Within the museum and gallery axis that nurtured it, however, it has spun off a cottage industry of sculptures, photographs, drawings and videos.cottage industry of sculptures, photographs, drawings and videos.

But if Cremaster 3 is an innovative artwork that has been credited with breaking down the distance between sculpture and film, is it also a great movie? Probably yes. In its invention of a self-contained mythological world and its fondness for actors wearing masks and prosthetic makeup, it suggests a loopy, highbrow response to the Star Wars cycle. To my eyes, at least, the Cremaster films convey an sense of antic adventure and playfulness that all but vanished from the Star Wars movies beginning with The Phantom Menace.

A figure who reappears in several guises (including a woman who is half cheetah, half human) is the Paralympic athlete, model and double amputee Aimee Mullins, who won world records with her prosthetic legs in the 100- and 200-yard dash and in the long jump. In another guise, she appears in an anteroom of the Cloud Club slicing potatoes with triangular blades attached to plexiglass legs. If any modern athlete incarnates the will to overcome the seemingly impossible, it is certainly Ms. Mullins who presides over the movie like an ominous muse.

3 culminates at the Guggenheim Museum with a quasi-apocalyptic initiation rite in which the apprentice (played by Mr. Barney) acrobatically swings from level to level of the museum's curved ramp, confronting various mythic opponents.

Stephen Holden, NY Times, 15/5/02

Cremaster Website