Drawing Restraint 9 (Matthew Barney, 2005)

[Lino]

This is as avant-garde as it gets.

More info here.

[leo goldsmith]

I knew this collaboration would have to happen at some point. Fantastic news!

[justeleblanc]

I still don't know how I feel about the Cremaster or Matthew Barney. Of the two of them, I think Barney might be the most ambitious... but Bjork is the more talented. Barney does have this Herzogian side to him that you have to admire. It's just that there's something to "trendy" about the Cremaster, maybe it was in his choice of costume designer...

Just curious though, does anyone know the backstory of the relationship between Bjork at Barney? I wonder if they shared a "cute meet" a la Diane Keaton and Woody Allen.

[godardslave]

bjork is one of my heroines. this film (and hopefully the music too) looks very interesting.

[dekadetia]

(and hopefully the music too)

There's actually a flash player of excerpts from the soundtrack on the page that Annie links, near the bottom. At first blush, it seems most reminicent of Medulla. And there are some instrumental bits in "Bath" and "Shimenawa" that I can imagine that heavy-metal-glacial Cremaster 3 logo rolling over. So far I'd say it sounds like you would probably predict this collaboration to sound. Not to say that's a bad thing.

[Lino]

Trailer

[leo goldsmith]

I'll be seeing this on Friday and will report back ...

[leo goldsmith]

So, yeah, this is incredible. I think it's probably Barney's best film so far -- in spite of himself, he seems to become more comfortable with being a filmmaker (and esp. an editor!) with each new film. Here, the presence of the missus does much to soften the austerity and injects the intellectual perversion with a welcome shot of romance (!) and an erotic quality that, while it was already there in the Cremaster films, is more palpable here. It's maybe more palettable, too -- mmm, sashimi.

And like the previous films, it's also damn funny. Moments of strange, unsettling humor, Kubrickian uncanniness, horror-movie spine-tingling, and Wikipediable arcana (cf. ambergris). Barney's square-jawed impassivity notwithstanding, you really get the impression that making this film was a hell of a lot of fun.

And the music is phenomenal -- less smarty-pants than Bepler's (also fantastic) music for Cremaster and better integrated than Barney's previous pop music injections (Murphy's Law, Morbid Angel).

[Lino]

Official site

[godardslave]

does anyone know if this is going to be released on DVD?

[Barmy]

The ads that the IFC Center have for this state that it will NEVER be released on DVD.

But that's what George Lucas said about Star Wars...

[zedz]

does anyone know if this is going to be released on DVD?

Barney is probably too purist (or too commercially astute) to do so. The Cremaster DVD is apparently only available to purchasers of one of his sculptures. There's no commercial imperative for him to release a DVD, and the film's rarity will just enhance his mystique (and thus asking price for future works), so I wouldn't hold my breath.

[backstreetsbackalright]

On the other hand, I suspect that eventually Barney won't be able to command the kind of rapt attention he does now. When and if that happens, it might make very good sense to put out some DVDs.

Sure, a DVD may never materialize, but I certainly wouldn't bet against it.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

There are some good reasons here as to why the DVD might never come, but there is a soundtrack out and why on earth would someone want a soundtrack for a movie they can't see?
Also, Bjork is in the movie and her audience is sizable enough where one could recoup one's costs from producing such a DVD. However, it is a Matthew Barney film so I wouldn't hold my breath either.
As to this theatre saying that it'll never come out on DVD; what else would they say? "Hey, don't walk in and take a look because it'll only be on DVD anyway." I think a person who really wants to see the movie will step in regardless. Besides, it'd look better on the big screen anyway. Then again, their comment that it won't be on DVD could be a sly little dig at Mr. Cremaster himself.

[zedz]

There are some good reasons here as to why the DVD might never come, but there is a soundtrack out and why on earth would someone want a soundtrack for a movie they can't see?

I daresay Bjork has a healthier relationship with her audience than her spouse does with his. I'd guess that any future DVD release would most likely be at her urging.

And you can see Drawing Restraint, just not on DVD. Soundtracks were around long before the idea of actually owning a copy of the parent film became imaginable.

[Donald Trampoline]

And you can see Drawing Restraint, just not on DVD. Soundtracks were around long before the idea of actually owning a copy of the parent film became imaginable.

By "see it," of course you mean if you live in one of the 12 or so major metropolitan areas in which the film may or may not be screened, at one theater at a time with limited showtimes for just about a week or two if you're lucky as we are in L.A.

Guess Barney doesn't give a crap about people living in New Hampshire or Iowa seeing his movie, which is unfortunate, since they could rent it through Netflix or something if he'd just put his films on DVD. (I would love to watch the Cremaster films again!)

[marty]

Drawing Restraint 9 is premiering in Melbourne, Australia at ACMI next Friday on May 12 for limited screenings. The new Barney documentary, No Restraint will also be screening along with encore screening of The Cremaster Cycle. Also, De Lama Lamina. All screenings will be next weekend. Can't wait!

[zedz]

And you can see Drawing Restraint, just not on DVD. Soundtracks were around long before the idea of actually owning a copy of the parent film became imaginable.

By "see it," of course you mean if you live in one of the 12 or so major metropolitan areas in which the film may or may not be screened, at one theater at a time with limited showtimes for just about a week or two if you're lucky as we are in L.A.

Well, yeah, but I don't see how that situation is so different from other extreme minority art-house films - or virtually any art-house films at all more than six years ago.

The expectation that every new film will one day be ownable is a very new phenomenon, and it is certainly not the norm for experimental film.
At least Barney's film is getting some kind of American distribution! There are a lot of far more significant experimental filmmakers who are lucky to even get a handful of festival slots.

[marty]

There are rumours that The Cremaster Cycle and Drawing Restraint 9 will be available on DVD at some point in the next few years. The problem is that I believe to fund those films, Matthew Barney, had to sell his various scultpures to museums around the world so to clear the films for DVD is a logistical rights nightmare. However, I believe at some point at least those two films should be on DVD but it may take a few years more to work through the legal side of it. Also, the films were shot on HD so the DVD transfer will look fantastic with 5.1 audio.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

No Restraint? Is this a career doc or just one on the movie? Do you know who the director is?
Is De Lama Lamina another Barney project?

[marty]

No Restraint is directed by Alison Cherick and is basically about the making of Drawing Restraint 9 as well as delving into Matthew Barney's development as an artist. De Lama Lamina is a short film made by Barney after Cremaster Cycle.

[Antoine Doinel]

Palm Pictures had acquired the theatrical rights for the US and UK release of the entire Cremaster cycle.

Hopefully, they'll have a hand in bringing it to DVD. The entire Cremaster cycle was screened in Montreal last fall (sadly, I missed it - most of the screenings were during work hours and the ones that weren't sold out very quickly).

[leo goldsmith]

Guess Barney doesn't give a crap about people living in New Hampshire or Iowa seeing his movie, which is unfortunate, since they could rent it through Netflix or something if he'd just put his films on DVD.

Barney's career and reputation hangs largely on his cache with the art-crowd, not John Q. Netflix. So, no, he doesn't give a shit about bringing his work to the burbs any more than another contemporary sculptor would be interested in showing his work at a gallery fifty miles outside of Des Moines. This may seem unfair to those expecting Cremaster: The DVD, The Action Figure, The Beach Towel, but it's an intrinsic part of how Barney has always positioned himself. It's also an explicit (and ironic) part of his films and sculptures.

However, with a little ingenuity and a couple of emails, it's very easy (and not terribly expensive) to acquire the entire Cremaster Cycle on dvd. Just don't tell little Isadora -- it will make her cry.

The soundtrack, by the way, is amazing.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Sir, do not dangle "Cremaster" and "DVD" in the same sentence before us like that! The music in Cremaster 5 quite a treat. I'm intrigued by Will Oldham's contribution to Drawing Restraint 9.

[Antoine Doinel]

Monday: Platform Matthew Barney, "Drawing Restraint," getting attention (Jun 19, 2006)
By Glen Helfand

Using film as key component of a grandiose, multimedia body of art, Matthew Barney has become one of the most visible artists of his generation. His five-part "Cremaster Cycle" of films, as well as Barney's sculpture, photography, and drawings, was the subject of a massive traveling exhibition that climaxed in 2003 at New York's Guggenheim Museum, where the three-hour opus was set. His next project, "de Lama Lamina," a myth-invoking mixture of environmentalism and extreme sexual acts, was shot in a Carnaval parade in Bahia, Brazil, in 2004, and is viewed as more of an experimental detour (though sequences from it form Barney's "Hoist," featured in the artist/porn omnibus "Destricted"). "Drawing Restraint 9," a feature-length film starring Barney and real life partner Björk, has already hit theatres (distributed by IFC).

"Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint," a film and gallery project organized by the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, opens at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this week. The following conversation took place in San Francisco this spring, during preparations for the exhibition. (Next week, SF360 features a conversation with Benjamin Weil, SFMOMA Curator of Media Arts, about the show.)

SF360: Clearly, your projects relate to film genres, yet they aren't so often discussed from that angle. How do you describe your use of cinematic references in your work?

Matthew Barney: Film is a liberator for me. At the time I was starting to make single-channel video [not] to simply document real-time performances on video, but to start editing them and to accept that they were going to be narrative, I immediately started to look to film to find examples of stories that described an object, or a sculptural condition, through a narrative. Horror film was the thing I'd already latched on to as a kid, but felt like they were the things to look at -- like 'Jaws' or 'Das Boot' -- films where there's an isolated object in an environment, and the environment becomes a dominant character and infuses the object. The actors become secondary. I think that's where my influence from film started.

Making the 'Cremaster' films it was more about finding a container for each of these stories, which was usually provided by the location, but film genres ended up supporting that. Starting with, for example, the Rocky Mountains and wanting to structure a story around the Rockies and down into the salt flats in Utah. That was the first structure of that story. [Norman Mailer's] 'The Executioner's Song' was laid over the top of that, and then the Western film genre. That was already embedded in the 'The Executioner's Song,' but it felt like it would be helpful to allow in references from the Western.

SF360: Film is also much more accessible, more democratic as a medium. Do you employ that as a conceptual strategy?

Barney: I was pretty turned on by the possibility of the films being able to exist on their own in a cinema while still functioning for me as making sculpture, as a text that I could pull sculpture from. When that started happening, when audiences started coming to films on their own, that influenced my thinking. I became interested in how far out a film could go on its own before it was unrecoverable from my needs. That's all been positive, I think. I also am relieved by the fact that there is some aspect to what I do that has a more democratic distribution. It is a very limited distribution in film terms, but in art terms, in sculpture-making terms, where you've got an object that you have to travel across the world to see, I enjoy the fact that these have the possibility of a broader distribution. At the end of the day, I want to communicate, and film has certain advantages in its ability to communicate.

SF360: Yet your films are still limited to art audiences; they're not available on DVD. Why?

Barney: They cannot be distributed as DVDs because they originally sold as limited-edition art objects. If a sculpture is in an edition of six, you can't make more of them. It's not right for them to be available to be owned in an unlimited way after they've been sold in a limited way. I have the right to do theatrical distribution of the films, which I've done with 'Cremaster' and 'Drawing Restraint 9.' In Paris, they have now, for the second time, brought back the series. It's certainly a better condition to see it than on a monitor.

SF360: One thing I found particularly interesting about 'Drawing Restraint 9' was the way that I was never sure when I was seeing 'authentic' costumes and actions and when they were designed by you. Any westerner who visits Japan cannot help but be mystified by things there. How much of that shaped the film?

Barney: It was very easy to find things in Japan that were sympathetic to things I was interested in. Choreography, the formality, the care with which objects are handled, the respect objects they're given in daily life, not just in religious practice. But I felt like I couldn't and didn't want to abstract the environment like I have in the past. I didn't want to manipulate the ship in any way; to let it be what it was. to go into a real condition and accept it for what it was and let that drive certain aspects of the story. This comes from feeling like I was working in an environment that wasn't in any way mine. The 'Cremaster' projects all had western locations -- whether they were part of my bloodline or not, they belonged to me in some way. It felt very different to go to Japan and to try and have the kind of intimacy with the environment that I was used to having. It felt quite frustrating at the beginning to realize that I really couldn't. I would have to assume this guest role. I think that it eventually became quite interesting, as it became part of making this restraint piece. This interest in shooting the piece on the Nisshin Maru, which is a very politicized piece of hardware. What was probably a really positive thing for the piece would be to tell the story on the ship, let the ship be exactly what it is, yet not pass any judgment on the ship and what happens on it, to just let the story take place there.

SF360: The scene where you and Björk are outfitted in those costumes. You have to admit you both looked kind of ridiculous. How intentional was that?

Barney: I thought of the tea ceremony as a way to bring two people together and be enabled by a host. The structure of the tea ceremony could offer that. Here you have these two western characters coming into a situation that's foreign to them. You can't really participate in a tea ceremony if you don't know what you're doing. There were a lot of questions of to what level of proficiency they'd be given in that scene. I knew I wanted them to have a magnetism that was pulling them together, I started thinking of the way they'd be pulled magnetically together, and as they were moving, they'd be learning. They could have a certain level of proficiency. But they still needed to feel awkward in that environment, and the costumes were made with that in mind. That it would be difficult to walk in the shoes, the weight of the fur. I'd always thought of a lot of the prosthetic characters in the same terms, that they would have an otherworldly aspect to the way they moved and looked, but the way they've moved is informed by the difficultly of moving in a costume like that or in a prosthetic. The satyr piece, 'Drawing Restraint 7,' had a lot to do with that. Wanting to make a piece that had a lot of movement in it, almost thinking of it in terms of dance. The way the prosthetic could enable a drama without asking these characters to act.

SF360: 'Drawing Restraint 9' followed your work on 'de Lama Lamina' in Brazil. Are you branching out to be more international in your scope?

Barney: I feel like I sorted something out in Japan; something was opened up in Brazil and resolved in Japan. I'm quite eager to do a project in America again.

The difference for me is that the 'Cremaster Cycle' is very autobiographical. Making something like that is like making a large organism that has many stories in it and many characters and locations that are all aspects of the same identity. 'Drawing Restraint 9' is about my relationship to something else, and by accessing that, it becomes more traditional. It's a relationship between things and the two guest characters. That feels hugely different for me, to actually have to think of the character and the environment as two separate things.

I have no idea what I'm going to do next.