WARNING!!! SPOILERS THRUOUGHT!!!
After having seen bits and pieces of Mathew Barney's Cremaster cycle, one expects more of the same. But then he offers up Drawing Restraint 9, and I came away, well, blown away. Cremaster was such a convoluted, mythological universe, that I tend to find it unlikely that anyone could produce a body of work that is equally accomplished, thought out, and sprawling.
Watching the opening scene of Drawing Restraint, I think of Chris Marker's filmic essay, Sans Soleil. Mostly because of the reference to Japan's Holiday, Coming of Age Day. The dancing seems to be lifted right out of Marker's film. The pacing of both films is actually pretty similar, as is the content. As Marker chose seemingly disparate images and concepts to illustrate a larger commonality in his films, Barney conflates his ideas about artistic restraint with a fantasy about whaling.
An extraordinary chain of events occurs in this film. A convergence of mythic proportions, in true Mathew Barney style. A whaling moratorium is lifted in Japan. Bjork and Barney's "occidental guest" characters arrive, inexplicably, by prearranged fishing boat trips in the middle of a Japanese ocean on a whaling ship. The combination of a violent storm, loosely Japanese and heavily stylized costuming, a large petroleum jelly sculpture, a riveting and very aquatic tea ceremony, some bizarre dismemberment, and a giant raw ambergris log, culminate in a human-to-whale transubstantiation for these occidental guests.
The pacing of the film is generally slow for its first two thirds, with beautiful imagery of a twenty year old whaling vessel seductively competing against this restrained pace. Then the storm comes, the petroleum begins to consume the entire ship, and there is no more restraint.
At its core, this is what the film is about. Barney's obsession with restraint, and his fearful desire to let it go. The Coming of Age Day dance speaks about evolution, from childhood to adulthood. This evolution is echoed throughout the film. The first song, composed by Bjork and Barney, speaks of a "million year old fossil", which is then lovingly wrapped, and sent as a thank you for lifting the whaling moratorium (again, restraints are released, allowing for a thriving economy and plenty of food in a previously depressed community, ethical issues of whaling notwithstanding). The petroleum and steel sculpture, The Field, goes through a constant evolution, from liquid petroleum, to something a little more solid, changing shape, having a spinal cord like object removed from it, briefly housing the ambergris log, then utterly falling apart and being melted down into liquid again. All of this preparing, changing, waiting, is the restraint part of this equation. Then something, in this case ambergris and a storm, catalyzes a strange metamorphosis, and Bjork and Barney turn into whales.
Barney must have undergone a similar process with this work, this ninth part of the Drawing Restraint whole being the product of that internal metamorphosis I am imagining for Barney. In all its grandiosity, all of Barney's timid pomp, its actually a very honest expression of fear. Fear of release, accomplishment, potential energy, and the unknown.
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