Not Available On DVD: Drawing Restraint 9
Maybe it's cheating to add a Matthew Barney film to this list. He has never released any of his films to the buying public in its entirety, and probably never will--he operates on the art-market paradigm of a sculptor and video artist, selling his work to museums and collectors rather than selling them through a conventional DVD distributor. When high-quality bootlegs of the movie turned up online, he was furious (possibly NSFW: screencap of Björk in a bathtub. With lemons. And no clothes. Ahem) that the integrity of his gallery piece had been disrupted.
But regardless of its distribution scheme, Drawing Restraint 9 is his most cinematic project to date--probably, to a certain extent, because his partner Björk has contributed not only the best score but also some of the best acting ever to grace his oeuvre, but also because DR9 represents Barney's happiest compromise so far between "performance art video" and good old-fashioned "surrealist film." The pacing is tighter here than in his Cremaster Cycle, although that isn't saying much (for a 2 1/2 hour film, DR9 offers an awful lot of personal grooming, not a lot of dialogue), and the visual payoffs are bigger too.
Plot? Well... there's whaling equipment. And Japanese people. And tons of Vaseline. No, literally, tons. Beyond that... er... you kind of have to see it for yourself. So cross your fingers--maybe a Barney retrospective will turn up at a museum, or arthouse, near you.
DannysNotHere
Posted to Art, DVD, Movies on 19 November 2007
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: björk, matthew barney
oh we know that whole movie was only about how great it was to be fucking bjork all day.
they turn into secret whales and swim away.
I was totally surprised by how watchable it was though.
I had trouble dealing with the Cremaster Movvies but this was fine and very very pretty.
and the rips aren't that high quality.
I've never before seen any of the Cremaster works in their entirety, but I was for a brief period fascinated with them. The official cycle trailer that's up at the official Cremaster site always struck me as downright beautiful. And perhaps the fact that it's pure Matthew Barney — with the flashy stuff highlighted and the slower parts chopped out — that makes me like that piddly trailer more than I ever might the full-on movies.