One of Barney's most engaging ongoing struggles is to create metaphors that tie issues of psychological development back to the human body-it's a sort of wistfully Freudian enterprise in the age of sterile conceptual art. The "Cremaster Cycle" is filled with references, both explicit and sublimated, to feces, mucous, urine, and semen-that last to be expected of a film series named for the cremaster, the muscle by which the male gonads descend. Mailer appears in the film through copious photographs and three avatars, one of whom is played by the author's own son, John Buffalo Mailer-a very good sport considering scenes such as the one where he crawls inside a dead cow. This is perhaps the most intriguing through line in the film because it seems to simultaneously be based on a sort of reverence for the man, and a critique of many of the guests who pretend to revere him but use reminiscences for their own ends. Barney combines these threads with the story of Mailer himself as recounted by people attending a wake at his Brooklyn home. The essential tales of the Egypt's founding gods-Osiris, Isis, Set, and Horus-and the land of the dead are also revived in Mailer's scatalogical fashion. Barney has loosely based much content on Mailer's 1983 pharaonic novel Ancient Evenings, itself a layered rambling epic that tells of Menenhetet the First, who prepares for his next incarnation by begetting the vessel of that life with his own granddaughter, Hathfertiti. The prominent postwar American author is both the source and the subject here. Understanding some of these will not help you to digest the entirety of the film, but they may shed some light on its mysteries. But there remain a catalog of symbols that relate back to Barney's longtime obsessions, which his fans will want to sift through and ponder. In River, the superbly composed spectacles are less in effect, with more emphasis given to driving the multiple interwoven plotlines along. Puzzling them together, though never quite possible, holds out the promise of profundity, or at least satisfaction. The flow of imagery is built not around a story so much as an idiosyncratic lexicon of signifiers and referents. In their best moments, however, those films offer stunningly beautiful and strange tableaux. The five films of the " Cremaster Cycle," for example, analogize the development of gender to the artistic process. Barney's movies are never "about" anything, except in the most grandiose of terms-they're closer to imposing visual tone poems. It's complicated, particularly if one approachs a Barney film expecting it to be "about" something crisply describable. The multiple narratives about jealous gods, reincarnated pharaohs, and Norman Mailer are confounding, but limpid storytelling is not the point. Yet, in truth the film-which aspires to be opera, with much music and singing throughout-is immunized against most critiques by Bepler's proviso, "That's not the point." Viewers felt every minute of the film's passing in part because of Barney's slender vocabulary of framing techniques and undifferentiated editing, but technically flawless filmmaking is not the point. Indeed, six hours of art in which reverent closeups of sewage wash over the screen repeatedly is a lot to lay on even the most devoted acolyte of the artist. But I hope it is.of interest." With that brief but hedging introduction from composer and collaborator Jonathan Bepler, Matthew Barney's latest film, River of Fundament, flowed forth for the first time at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater on Wednesday evening. "I won't tell you to enjoy yourselves, that is not the point.
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