Cremaster 4

Screening: 18 April, 6:30pm

1994
USA/UK/France
Director/Screenplay: Matthew Barney
Cinematography: Peter Strietmann
Loughton candidate: Matthew Barney
Ascending hacks: Team Molyneaux
Descending hacks: Team Sinnot Loughton
faerie: Sharon Marvel
42 mins; 35mm;
Certificate M (nudity)

Cremaster 4, the first film to be shot in the cycle of Matthew Barney's five experimental Cremaster pieces, is also one of the most complex in terms of the symbolic landscape the film-maker has devised around his narrative. The two motorcycle teams that race around the Isle of Man, where the film is shot, represent opposing forces of ascension and descension and the film revolves around the main characters attempt to transcend biology and remain in a state of pure potential. The final image of a retracted scrotum attached to two motorcycles hints at the outcome of these efforts and refers us back to the cremaster muscle which controls testicular movement.

In technical terms, this film is the crudest of the five, if only because imaging technology has moved so fast and Barney has learnt so much, since 1994. When it was first shown, however, it represented a watershed in the use of video in the art world. The sheer logistical scale of the project, not to mention the breadth of its ambition, radically transformed notions of what was possible for artists in the medium. And, in the thrilling image of his character, the Loughton candidate walking across the sea floor, Barney created one of the iconic moments in contemporary art.

Francis McKee, Sight And Sound, 12/03

Cremaster 5

USA
1997
Director/Screenplay: Matthew Barney
Cinematography: Peter Strietmann
The Queen of Chain: Ursula Andress
Her Diva/Her Magician/Her Giant: Matthew Barney
The Queen's Ushers: Joanne Rha, Susanne Rha
40 mins; 35mm; Certificate M (nudity)

Cremaster 5is stripped of the farcical humour that marks the rest of the series: this is the one episode that operates entirely in tragic mode, with Barney's idiosyncratic kitsch asking to be taken seriously as a Decadent-styled fin de siëcle aesthetic rapture. Set in Budapest, apparently in the 19th century, 5 is a self-enclosed vignette as opposed to the sprawling diversity of 2 and 3 in which the Queen of Chain, lip-synched with regal froideur by Ursula Andress, laments the death of the Magician, with whom she remembers sharing a tryst in a snowy forest. Lushly mounted but more sombre than the other episodes, this is Barney's take on operatic historical romance.

Barney variously sculptor, draughtsman and highly athletic performance artist is a complete auteur in the sense that no element is left to chance. It is as if everything is generated directly from his unconscious, to a degree that even Cronenberg or Lynch might envy; every object, down to an oddly formed triangle played in the orchestra, has the distinct shape and texture of a Barney object. Cremaster 5 is certainly the point in the series where Barney finds his own voice as a film-maker of considerable elegance rather than as an art-video maker with a talent for exhorbitant mise en scéne. The editing is no longer purely rhythmic or concentrated on establishing parallels, but fluid and suggestive.

Jonathan Romney, Sight And Sound.

Cremaster Website