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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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.