![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Cremaster 1 & 2
Feb. 13th, 2004 11:46 pmOkay. Just got back from seeing Cremaster 1 & 2 at ACMI.
Undigested Knee-Jerk Reactions:
I thought Cremaster 1 was tedious.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
andricongirl liked it.
I much preferred Cremaster 2. A* was hesitant.
That's as far as we got before she ran off tohorngirl's birthday drinks.
We saw them "cold", which is to say without prior reading up on the theory or analysis. I think this might have been a mistake. Because while I got a vague sense of "what they're all about", there was definately a lot there that didn't click.
What follows is me rambling, trying to work it out.
Cremaster 1
Two Goodyear blimps hover either side of a gridiron goal post. Inside each blimp -- in case you missed the symbolism -- is a table holding a statue of ovaries surrounded by grapes. Bored stewdaresses smoke and peer out the windows. In the womb-like space under the table, a woman (called Goodyear in the credits) bores a hole in the table cloth, steals some grapes, and arranges them in patterns. These patterns are reflected on the football field below by extravagantly dressed chorus girls.
Ovaries. Wombs. The light-hearted play of possible configurations. We get it already.
That was my problem with C1. It went on too long, repeated itself too much, and just wasn't visually interesting enough to warrant it. But I'm not a fan of flouro-coloured musicals, so maybe that's just my philistine tastes talking.
Cremaster 2
I liked this one much better.
Darker. Eerier. Like the malformed lovechild of David Lynch and David Cronenberg. Only without their respect for a straightforward narrative.
The dominant images: bees, murderer Gary Gilmore, Houdini, the ice-covered Rocky Mountains.
About two thirds in, we see a poster for Houdini's performance. The text reads something like "Harry Houdini's Metamorphosis - the World's Greatest Self-Liberator."
But liberation seems far away from this film. The Rocky Mountains loom like eternal prison walls. Bees swarm over everything, but bees only metamorphose once in thier lives and then are trapped in their role. And we see Gary Gilmore trapped inside a claustrophobic, womb-like Ford Mustang. The Ford is joined by a honeycomb-like chute to another Ford facing in the opposite direction. But Gilmore seems unable to cross over. Instead, he emerges to murder the gas station attendant. Both men seem unable to escape thier fate.
If C1 was about the joy of infinite possibilities, C2 is about the horror of being doomed to just one.
Tired now. Have just read the synopsis on the Cremaster website, and I seem to have caught the jist of things. Anticipating long replies frommorgan303.
Undigested Knee-Jerk Reactions:
I thought Cremaster 1 was tedious.
andricongirl liked it.I much preferred Cremaster 2. A* was hesitant.
That's as far as we got before she ran off to
horngirl's birthday drinks.We saw them "cold", which is to say without prior reading up on the theory or analysis. I think this might have been a mistake. Because while I got a vague sense of "what they're all about", there was definately a lot there that didn't click.
What follows is me rambling, trying to work it out.
Cremaster 1
Two Goodyear blimps hover either side of a gridiron goal post. Inside each blimp -- in case you missed the symbolism -- is a table holding a statue of ovaries surrounded by grapes. Bored stewdaresses smoke and peer out the windows. In the womb-like space under the table, a woman (called Goodyear in the credits) bores a hole in the table cloth, steals some grapes, and arranges them in patterns. These patterns are reflected on the football field below by extravagantly dressed chorus girls.
Ovaries. Wombs. The light-hearted play of possible configurations. We get it already.
That was my problem with C1. It went on too long, repeated itself too much, and just wasn't visually interesting enough to warrant it. But I'm not a fan of flouro-coloured musicals, so maybe that's just my philistine tastes talking.
Cremaster 2
I liked this one much better.
Darker. Eerier. Like the malformed lovechild of David Lynch and David Cronenberg. Only without their respect for a straightforward narrative.
The dominant images: bees, murderer Gary Gilmore, Houdini, the ice-covered Rocky Mountains.
About two thirds in, we see a poster for Houdini's performance. The text reads something like "Harry Houdini's Metamorphosis - the World's Greatest Self-Liberator."
But liberation seems far away from this film. The Rocky Mountains loom like eternal prison walls. Bees swarm over everything, but bees only metamorphose once in thier lives and then are trapped in their role. And we see Gary Gilmore trapped inside a claustrophobic, womb-like Ford Mustang. The Ford is joined by a honeycomb-like chute to another Ford facing in the opposite direction. But Gilmore seems unable to cross over. Instead, he emerges to murder the gas station attendant. Both men seem unable to escape thier fate.
If C1 was about the joy of infinite possibilities, C2 is about the horror of being doomed to just one.
Tired now. Have just read the synopsis on the Cremaster website, and I seem to have caught the jist of things. Anticipating long replies from
morgan303.
