Cremaster 3
Feb. 15th, 2004 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sharplittleteethHmm...
All the reveiws said Cremaster 3 was the best of the cycle. They were wrong.
I came out of Cremaster 2 with my mind on fire, burning with desire to understand, to see the whole Cycle. Cremaster 3 killed that dead.
I don't actually have a lot to say about this one. There's a synopsis on the Cremaster website that offers as much insight as I can. All I can add is that while I could find a clear thematic development between C1 and C2, C3 seemed unconnected.
And that Matthew Barney is hit and miss as a filmmaker.
He composes some incredible images. But he has no grasp of pacing. The first half of C3 was (with some remarkable exceptions) simply boring.
I know this isn't Hollywood. But if you choose to work in a time-based medium, you have accept that timing is part of your aesthetic effect. Barney doesn't get that his audience is visually literate. We don't need to be beaten repeatedly over the head with an image for it to register. We grew up on MTV, man.
Maybe that's the problem. Maybe the Role of Tedious Repetion in Video Art is simply to cover the artist's insecuirities. "This is High Art," he screams, looping an image for the seventh time, "Not some lowbrow video-clip."
(Something similar happened during the early day of photography. Photographers would recreate famous paintings for the camera, in a bid to be regarded as a serious art form.)
Whatever the reasoning, it doesn't work. It robs the film of emotional impact. And makes me question the competence of the maker. There are ways of expressing boredom, without being boring yourself.
And while we're talking incompetance: can the Guggenhiem Museum please set up a fund to pay a bouncer to follow Mathew Barney around, and punch the mutherfucker if he ever tires to film slapstick comedy again? That bar scene is just cringeworthy.
The second half is better. There's some actual pace to the pacing, some more great images, and a duel between hardcore bands Agnostic Front and Murhpy's Law. But it still lacks the visceral punch of Cremaster 2.
Linky Goodness:
Racing Dead Horses. Dental Torture. The Usual. -- New York Times review of Cremaster 3, lots of insight.
Self-Portraiture Meets Mythology: Matthew Barney Talks About His "Cremaster Cycle" -- like it says, an interview with Mathew Barney.
All the reveiws said Cremaster 3 was the best of the cycle. They were wrong.
I came out of Cremaster 2 with my mind on fire, burning with desire to understand, to see the whole Cycle. Cremaster 3 killed that dead.
I don't actually have a lot to say about this one. There's a synopsis on the Cremaster website that offers as much insight as I can. All I can add is that while I could find a clear thematic development between C1 and C2, C3 seemed unconnected.
And that Matthew Barney is hit and miss as a filmmaker.
He composes some incredible images. But he has no grasp of pacing. The first half of C3 was (with some remarkable exceptions) simply boring.
I know this isn't Hollywood. But if you choose to work in a time-based medium, you have accept that timing is part of your aesthetic effect. Barney doesn't get that his audience is visually literate. We don't need to be beaten repeatedly over the head with an image for it to register. We grew up on MTV, man.
Maybe that's the problem. Maybe the Role of Tedious Repetion in Video Art is simply to cover the artist's insecuirities. "This is High Art," he screams, looping an image for the seventh time, "Not some lowbrow video-clip."
(Something similar happened during the early day of photography. Photographers would recreate famous paintings for the camera, in a bid to be regarded as a serious art form.)
Whatever the reasoning, it doesn't work. It robs the film of emotional impact. And makes me question the competence of the maker. There are ways of expressing boredom, without being boring yourself.
And while we're talking incompetance: can the Guggenhiem Museum please set up a fund to pay a bouncer to follow Mathew Barney around, and punch the mutherfucker if he ever tires to film slapstick comedy again? That bar scene is just cringeworthy.
The second half is better. There's some actual pace to the pacing, some more great images, and a duel between hardcore bands Agnostic Front and Murhpy's Law. But it still lacks the visceral punch of Cremaster 2.
Linky Goodness:
Racing Dead Horses. Dental Torture. The Usual. -- New York Times review of Cremaster 3, lots of insight.
Self-Portraiture Meets Mythology: Matthew Barney Talks About His "Cremaster Cycle" -- like it says, an interview with Mathew Barney.
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hey sharplittlteeth, interesting journal u have...I like The Mars Volta also!
Date: 2004-02-15 04:34 am (UTC)have you heard about The Passion? it's a movie about the last hours of Jesus' life before the Crucifixion - i've heard a lot of good things about it, and i agree after seeing the trailers...
Here's some links I found
Some trailers (http://movies.go.com/movies/P/passion_2003/index.html?sptype=AV&ipsrc=media&reftype=pi#)
Information (http://www.passion-movie.com)
The Passion of the Christ (flash) (http://www.thepassionofthechrist.com)
Other trailers (http://www.thepassion.tv)
It will be out on Ash Wednesday, February 25th in the United States.
I may not know you, but I do want to let my brothers and sisters know about this movie. Some people are concerned the movie might be too violent. But let's be honest, the Cross was violent! Crucifixion was a brutal form of execution. When Jesus died for my sins, the nails were real, his flesh broke, and the blood fell. This incredible (and violent) act paid the price that I couldn't pay. After seeing the violence that Jesus may have suffered, I want to know him more, I want to be a more committed follower of Jesus, I want people to know what Jesus did. Because of this, I personally believe it's worth the risk of taking some heat by promoting this movie. So I don't really care about being made fun of for posting a 'religious' message. If you want to help others to realize what Christ did for us, encourage them to see this movie!
later sharplittlteeth,
- aaron
Re: hey sharplittlteeth, interesting journal u have...I like The Mars Volta also!
Date: 2004-02-15 06:36 am (UTC)Now *this* is performance art!
Date: 2004-02-15 08:23 am (UTC)Nice timing, Aaron.
Re: Now *this* is performance art!
Date: 2004-02-15 02:52 pm (UTC)I wonder if ill get it as I have IP logging on.. can we trace the fucker then?
Re: Now *this* is performance art!
Date: 2004-02-16 08:59 am (UTC)Grrr...
They *said* The Passion was going to cause a resurgence in 'religious issues'. I can't help but feel that at this time, in this political climate, this film is not exactly a Good Thing.
Re: Now *this* is performance art!
Date: 2004-02-16 09:01 am (UTC)Re: Now *this* is performance art!
Date: 2004-02-16 03:08 pm (UTC)I'm of the mind it is the latter
no subject
Date: 2004-02-15 08:06 am (UTC)The artist as auteur. What would the films have been like if he had hired a director or even an assistant director? Or would that be like getting someone to help you sketch a painting or chisel out a marble bust... or cast a balloon bunny out of steel?
But isn't it fucking cool to see the artist leap and climb and run like a thing possessed?
If I wasn't convinced of the Cycle's resonance directly after the film, I was at some point past midnight when Merzbow was in full sonic swing and I was thinking that I'd really like to hear those bees + drums again.
So, 4+5: yea or nay?
JAn
P.S. Yes, I fully expect for merciless piss to be taken out of me for posting a comment on LJ. Blame Barney.
P.P.S. LJ spell-check doesn't recognise "auteur". I think that says more than I ever could.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-15 03:03 pm (UTC)i think watching barney climbing was sort of cool too.. :]
and Im having some thoughts on prosthetic legs and having crazy ideas. more on the possibillities of cyber limbs and the new cometic surgery of such things as opposed to the ballard 'crash' asthetic fetish though.. but its a tangent which probally isn't directly related to Barney..
but those (glass /perspex) legs were magnificent.
pity im flat out today at wotk i probally wont actually get around to reading and replying and conversing as I should like on this.
I'll try to print those articles to read later
Re:
Date: 2004-02-15 05:15 pm (UTC)Sounds more like Stellarc territory.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-15 05:14 pm (UTC)Yea. But out of curiosity now, rather than desire. Which is what I felt after C2.
The artist as auteur. What would the films have been like if he had hired a director or even an assistant director?
Less Barney, perhaps. Or maybe more - sometimes it felt like Barney was struggling with a medium he didn't quite understand. (But that may just be me projecting my inadequacies onto the artist.)
My feeling is- if you walk out on stage and start banging the keys of a grand piano, the audience will respond to the noise. It doesn't matter if you say you're a painter, not a musician. The noise is there, and the audience will respond to it.
And yes, it was cool seeing him climb. In pastel pink Highland dress.
Re: more disjointed notes
Date: 2004-02-15 05:36 pm (UTC)if this is visual sculpture not film so i don't think any film making devices need to come into it.
sort of like the bar was made of petrolum jelly, so it looks like a bar, but its really a shaped mass of vas , and if you tried to use it, it would melt or you would find your self stuck and sinking in it.
things arent what they seem, its appears to be a film but its not
I do understand your saying the audience would probally respond to a film, but i didn't find myself thinking about the filmic devices that much, except in cases where i think the make up and costumes need a little touch up.
perhaps its my art schooling coming into play here, but i can see its a visual sculpture, or a moving image and not a film. even though it uses the medium of film to present the sculpture.
theres a lot more direct narrative going on than i think i was expecting. though thats the wrong word as i really didn't know what to expect.
though as I mentioned #3 seems to me to be the most Film like.. so it is at odds.
still havent read aticles only site synopsis, whcih enlightened me not
Re:
Date: 2004-02-16 08:38 am (UTC)The audience would probably respond differently if the pianist was a painter, especially a well-known one. They'd be looking for elements of 'visuality', maybe neo-expressionism, that sort of thing, or use the music as an aural cue for accessing the art, because they're linked at least contextually. They'd be more forgiving of technical inadequacy, knowing the pianist was primarily 'something else'. Similarly, Barney's vision mediated by a 'professional' film director would contextually root the film within cinematic paradigms for the audience, aside from the *actual* difference made by the presence of a mediator in the production of the film.
As far as the subject of creative 'interference' - art not created necessarily by the hand of the artist - is concerned, you simply can't go past Marcel Duchamp's readymades. He began exhibiting them in 1914 (or thereabouts, have to check that one), and the idea was that Duchamp would go down to the shop, buy something mass-produced like a wine rack or snow shovel, sign it and exhibit it. The result was a powerful and controvesial statement on the artist's presence within the artwork, the transformative power of the Gallery, and of the artist's signature as a statement of conceptual authorship. It got even more complex when he gave them titles (like "In Advance of a Broken Arm" for a snow shovel, which recontextualised it completely) and made multiples, as he did with his famous urinal of 1917. The art world still hasn't recovered.:)
Duchamp was an amazing man - he got into art largely for fun, was one of the 'inventors' of Cubism, a chess Master, cross-dresser, habitual punner, and a multi-lingual sex-god. I have a crush on him a mile wide.
There's a lot that can be said about the idea of the artist as auteur, as it's still a major thematic concern in the art world today, and has been since Duchamp.Appropriationist artists like Mike Bidloand Sherrie Levine address this sort of thing interestingly, as do the 'conceptual' artists like JOseph Kosuth and Sol Lewitt, whose work I can go into a bit further if you're interested. But I don't want to ramble too much here, and there's a character limit.:)
Re:
Date: 2004-02-17 04:13 am (UTC)"They" might. Not sure I would.
I'm not saying our hypothetical painter has to be a concert level pianist. I'm just saying if you're going to make noise part of your art piece, it has to be good noise. It has to add to the emotion.
And that was my problem. On occasion, Barney's handling of pace subtracted from the piece.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-16 05:13 pm (UTC)I've been tossing this around and wondering about the artists vision being limited by his ability and perhaps budget. Some of the visual effects in 3 were atrocious and unfortunately served to "throw" me out of the film. Obviously Barney was hampered by a limited CGI budget and perhaps his skill or the skills of his assistants.
I saw parts of 1 online in really bad compression quality and the grapes falling out of the shoe looked like grapes and not like little CGI balls. I was a little disappointed to see them so crudely rendered.
I understand there's an aspect of abstraction, but I think when making film you should try to make it look as much like film as possible. Otherwise, isn't it like carving a statue out of styrofoam and then explaining that you couldn't afford marble? (That is, unless, you're making some sort of marble vs styrofoam statement.)
So, which parts worked, really worked for you? What were the moments where your mind just couldn't help but cry, "yes!"
With the prosthetics, I wondering if any of that owes a debt to Barney's football scholarship > injury > artist life path.
How much of our reaction is informed by the fact that this is Art? Perhaps when asked: "So what did you think?" It is is enough to answer: "Crap film, brilliant art"
Re:
Date: 2004-02-17 04:00 am (UTC)So, which parts worked, really worked for you? What were the moments where your mind just couldn't help but cry, "yes!"
Cremaster 1:
- Goodyear twisting and turning under the womb-like table.
- Goodyear tearing ahole inthe table cloth.
- The bored air hostesses (the first few times)
(Never really cried "yes!". Occasionally thought "that's kind of cool." But camp and kitsch don't really appeal to me. And the repetition drained the joy out of the stuff I did like.)
Cremaster 2
- The seance.
- The bee sex.
- The bee/drumming sequence.
- The murder of the gas station attendant.
(Hmm... I'm having trouble remembering actual sequences from the film. What I do remember is the overall mood, oppressive and haunted. And my mind racing as I tried to work out how it all fitted together.
And then I saw the Houdini Metamorphosis poster. Something went click. Thought about it. Realised that my idea didn't quite fit. There was a second, profounder click. And I understood not only C2, but C1 as well, and how they were related.)
Cremaster 3
- The corpse crawling out of its grave. Not just how it looked, but how it moved.
- The corpse being placed in the vintage car, with the eagle on the back seat. (The eagle made me think of Tibetan air burials. Which is what the demolition derby was.)
- The dead-horse race (but that was "cool" rather than "yes!")
- The dental torture scene. Not just the creepiness, but for the Cronenberg-esque anatomy.
- The utterly gorgeous art-deco style inside the Chrysler building.
The Order has its "cool" moments: Aimee Mullins on her glass artificial legs, the duelling punk bands, Barney leaping and climbing with that fucked-up bloodstained mouth.
(The Celtic myth prologue left me dubious. Then the corpse blew me away. My hopes were high. But the first half dashed that. Too tedious, too little substance. The second half was better. But I kept searching for that moment of click. And it never came. I think that's partly why I was so dissapointed with C3.)
Re:
Date: 2004-02-17 05:37 pm (UTC)perhaps when he has more money he can go bck and re edit it in better CG.
but perhaps he doen't want to. for whatever reasons.
it is done now and i guess one cannot keep going back to a piece and re working every flaw, or you never get anything else done ;]
so perhaps it is enough to say great art, bad film.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-15 08:30 am (UTC)Can't wait to hear what you think of 4 and 5.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-15 05:05 pm (UTC)To me, the only section that really stood out as a piece offilm was the corpse crawling out of the grave. Because its beauty lay not merely in how the corpse looked, but in how it moved. Film is dance, not sculpture.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-15 05:39 pm (UTC)but dance can be sculpture. film can be dance, therefore film can be sculpture too.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-16 09:11 am (UTC)It's interesting that 3 seems to be the least well-paced, despite being made last. 4 and 5 seem to have been much more watchable, though 4 tends to wax a little 'arty' as far as basic watchability is concerned, it never bored me, and 5, though made in 1997, made me wish, desperately, that cinema was more like that, completely compelling.
Also cool that you should make the contrast between dance and sculpture for film. You probably know Barney started out as a sculptor, and much of the Cremaster touring exhibits has been sculpture. Which is why he's so good at the tableau, I guess, presumably at the expense of movement. Especially interesting, because he's an athlete, and he himself has a dancer's physicality. God, it's 4am and I'm really waffling. Sorry.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-15 07:29 pm (UTC)Thursday 19 February, 7:30pm
Sunday 22 February, 2:30p
which one?
we should get tix asap.