OPENS OCTOBER 17, CERT TBC, VARIOUS MINS
Boldly straddling the chasm between obscure gallery installation and provocative arthouse epic, The Cremaster Cycle, made by Björk's boyfriend Matthew Barney, is as sumptuous as it is obtuse, as impervious as it is ambitious. Eight years in the making, with five movies in the cycle, Cremaster (named after muscles that control testicular movement) unfolds in Barney's brashly symbolic landscape as he flips from the Isle Of Man to Budapest to New York via a grotesquerie of malformed hermaphrodite protagonists (many played by Barney himself) engaged in futile tasks, including motor-racing in opposite directions, eating grapes through a tablecloth, and filling a lift with wet cement.
A narrative précis is hazardous and attempts to interpret Barney's work though the movies' cheeky nods to Celtic mythology, Freemasonry and Mormonism fall flat. Suffice to say that in a world of corporate cinema, the chance to see a film cycle with satyrs, motor-cross, death metal, a butterfly vagina and beehive penis (don't ask!), and five doves tethered to mutant subterranean genitalia is not to be squandered.
Boldly straddling the chasm between obscure gallery installation and provocative arthouse epic, The Cremaster Cycle, made by Björk's boyfriend Matthew Barney, is as sumptuous as it is obtuse, as impervious as it is ambitious. Eight years in the making, with five movies in the cycle, Cremaster (named after muscles that control testicular movement) unfolds in Barney's brashly symbolic landscape as he flips from the Isle Of Man to Budapest to New York via a grotesquerie of malformed hermaphrodite protagonists (many played by Barney himself) engaged in futile tasks, including motor-racing in opposite directions, eating grapes through a tablecloth, and filling a lift with wet cement.
A narrative précis is hazardous and attempts to interpret Barney's work though the movies' cheeky nods to Celtic mythology, Freemasonry and Mormonism fall flat. Suffice to say that in a world of corporate cinema, the chance to see a film cycle with satyrs, motor-cross, death metal, a butterfly vagina and beehive penis (don't ask!), and five doves tethered to mutant subterranean genitalia is not to be squandered.



















