Cremaster 1

Screening: 11 April, 6:30pm

USA
1995

Director/Screenplay: Matthew Barney
Goodyear: Marti Domination
Goodyear hostesses: Gemma Bourdon Smith, Kathleen Crepeau, Nina Kotov, Jessica Sherwood, Tanyth Booth, Miranda Brooks, Kari McKahan, Catherine Mulcahy
40 mins; 35mm
Certificate PG (sexual references)

Cremaster 1, the second film to be shot in the Cremaster cycle, is the most distilled expression of Matthew Barney's vision. It's also the most exuberant, the sexiest and the most playful movie in the five-film series. Drawing on the sharp styles of the great Hollywood musicals, Barney's large scale choreographed sequences are governed by the spirit of Busby Berkeley. Jonathan Bepler's music too is impeccable, evoking a more innocent age, and a lost version of America that is now mostly defined through the studio musical spectaculars of the 1930s.

Filmed in the Bronco Stadium in Boise, Idaho (the hometown of former quarterback Barney), Cremaster 1 displays a more overt autobiographical element than the cycle's other instalments. The sense of childhood recalled is underlined by the main character, Goodyear, who spends the duration of the piece playing under a table shrouded, tent-like, by the tablecloth. This evocation of shielded youthful innocence, however, is balanced by more knowing acknowledgements of sexuality Goodyear is played by the legendary dominatrix Marti Domination, dressed in silk underwear, high heels, stockings and suspenders. For much of the film she is perched awkwardly just under the surface of the table on a small platform from which she must pursue the challenging task of stealing grapes from the world above.

Francis McKee, Sight And Sound, 12/03

Cremaster 2

USA
1999

Director/Screenplay: Matthew Barney
Harry Houdini: Norman Mailer
Gary Gilmore: Matthew Barney
Johnny Cash (drums): Dave Lombardo
Johnny Cash (with bees): Bruce Steele
Johnny Cash (voice): Steve Tucker
79 mins; 35mm; Certificate TBA

With a symmetry wholly appropriate to the film itself, Cremaster 2 is both the second and the penultimate instalment of Matthew Barney's quinary film cycle. As the sequential successor to Cremaster 1, Cremaster 2 begins to make apparent the cycle's two major trajectories: the large movement eastwards with regard to geographical location; and the smaller though perhaps more significant biological descent of the gonads during the process of male sexual differentiation. And as the penultimate film to be made in the cycle, it also makes apparent the greater resources that Barney has at his disposal financial, certainly, but conceptual, also and his continuing ability to create some of the most extraordinary images of our time.

In Cremaster 2, Barney uses the prehistory, life and death of convicted killer Gary Gilmore as a narrative with which to explore the most important theme of the cycle potentiality, and the anxiety of its transformation into actuality. Perhaps this is why forms of constraint play such an important role in his art, including an ongoing fascination with Harry Houdini, who appears here in a somewhat shackled performance by an arthritic Norman Mailer. Mailer's 1979 book on Gilmore, The Executioner's Song, provided much of Barney's material, in particular the claim that Houdini was Gilmore's grandfather.

Jeremy Millar, Sight And Sound, 2/04

Cremaster Website