Screen Machine

Review: Cremaster Cycle

Prior to this marathon Cremaster Cycle screening at ACMI, I entreated facebook/twitter to wish me luck. “It’s like flying economy all the way to London” quipped one friend, ominously. Having attempted the whole cycle in one sitting the last time it played at ACMI, I was steeling myself. I didn’t quite make it though, giving up after the epic 180-minute Cremaster 3. In a nice, Barney-esque analogy: the first attempt broke me a little, tore something in my brain, and in the manner of a body builder tearing muscle to build more, I lasted just a little longer this time.

It is not an unenjoyable experience, but despite the slight excited-art-nerd-buzz in the ticket queue, it wasn’t like the marathons of my youth at the local megaplex or the drive-in accompanied by a carton of popcorn bigger than your head and a gaggle of friends with whom I would talk all the way through all the films. For all its famed production values, unimaginable feats of logistics, slick, commercial-surrealist aesthetics (think edgy perfume ads from the 90s), and narrative framework (such as it is), Cremaster is still a primarily abstract art work.

In Cremaster, Barney has woven the most intricate narrative from a post-modern melange of contemporary and ancient, obvious and opaque, brutal and divine symbols. When I look back on my notes from the screenings, most of them consist of small word-collages rather than sentences: heels-hooves-fallopian tubes; helix shape-figure 8; cell division-pearl earring; womb-table; white-pre-life (Cremaster 1)

It’s just very like that.

The basic premise is the deployment of cyclical narratives, loaded with symbolism and meta-narrative, as metaphors to relate Barney’s complex ideas about human sexual development. He stages biological drama as human and historical drama: in Cremaster 1, the initial process of sex-cell differentiation is staged as a Busby Berkeley-inspired half-time spectacular while in Cremaster 2 and 3, the biological narrative is impossibly convoluted with the intertwined stories of executed killer Gary Gilmour and the Masonic history of the Chrysler building. Cremaster 4 and 5 depict the final stages of sexual descension as a motorcycle race and an operatic melodrama.

These somewhat long bows are drawn with the use of seamlessly convincing mise-en-scene, but the narrative is so slippery and evasive (dream-like, to use a tired cliché), that your brain is exercised trying to thread together these at times completely unfamiliar references, deployed in complex and unexpected ways.

It is unlike most experimental feature-film, although I suppose you could say that Guy Maddin, Chris Marker and David Lynch have worked in this vein to greater or lesser degrees. Lynch is the one who comes closest to Barney’s dynamite combination of an art-star conceptual agenda and Hollywood sense of scale. And conversely, hardly any visual artists have attempted narrative film works this ambitious. It is this slippage between Cremaster’s identity as video art and/or narrative feature that makes Cremaster so interesting.

Because despite its investment in cinematic tropes, the density of the films – animating and activating intricate webs of symbols the way it does – brings it closer to the experience of painting than either feature films (which generally rely on plot) or video art (which is dismissive of cinematic constructions). And it is Cremaster’s visual seductiveness which elevate it out of its potentially overwhelming settings. He affects, intervenes in and reconstructs his highly specific locations in such a convincing way that you find yourself wondering which bits are Barney and which bits are MOMA/Chrysler Building/Banff Springs. That is high praise when you are talking about some of the most iconic locations in North America, and a testament to his visual arts practice, and understanding of the subtle but important difference between installation and set-dressing.

So I’m obviously not a Cremaster Hater. However, it’s easy to confuse the grandiosity of Cremaster with genius. It is a dense, impressive and significant suite of works. There is no denying it. But at the same time, an undeniable appeal lives in mass-ornament. The fact that there are 5 of the suckers, and that they are so big and brash and pretty and hard to understand, I think tends to over-awe us. I mean, how do you critique something you are either barely comprehending, or massively over-stimulated by? And, if as I suggest, it should be read more like a painting than a movie, how can you hope to return to its contemplation on a regular enough basis, as you can with a painting, to begin to absorb more of it’s density when the film’s distribution is deliberately limited? (Barney has refused to make Cremaster available through mass media.) The film form it takes is spectacular and successfully cinematic: gleaming, seductive, engulfing and mythic. However, to experience it in the form it was intended necessitates a certain inability to comprehend it. I think this is a flaw of the work, or at least, a complication of it straddling art and film, requiring the extended contemplation of an art work, but lacking the distribution for it to be easily accessible to the public (bit-torrenting notwithstanding).

Jessie Scott is a video artist, producer and a founding member of temporal art collective Tape Projects.

→ more articles by Jessie Scott