[MOD: Apologies for the delay in posting this review. Got misplaced in the vacation and moderator switching cracks...]

[NOTE: This review may contain objectionable material.]

Cremaster 3
2002
Matthew Barney is director, producer (with Barbara Gladstone).
3 hours (can't find film length anywhere)
Unrated (I suspect it wd be NC17, maybe, but in any case it's not rated)
Not available on video
www.cremaster.net

Hello,

Just a quick note/pseudo-review as I avoid writing letters of recommendation for aspiring doctors (Billy Entitled personally founded a charity that serves over four million displaced Ghanaians, then re-wrote Kofi Annan's address on the AIDS crisis in Africa).

My friends and I went to see Cremaster 3 at Boston's MFA a few weeks ago. I haven't quite known whether to mention it to the AML list as it will definitively out me as one of those Eastern urban liberals, but I felt that some on the list might derive pleasure from it, and I saw it tacked on the end of the LDS film summary in the latest aml-list-digest, so I figured it was time to report it.

A note though: this film (were Barney ever to release it on DVD), would never, never, never be carried by Deseret Book in their a-single-Rulon-"Bobbie"-Smith-in-the-Western-desert-doesn't-like-it-WE-don't-like-it campaign. There are images in this review that can be upsetting, and if you prefer wholesome literature, I would delete this e-mail message without reading further.

For most people the description will be enough to eliminate interest: a three-hour film without a single line of dialogue (a couple of songs, one or two with discernible English words), named after the muscle that involuntarily elevates the testicles (responsible for that perplexing miracle of vanishing virility when cold waters run deep)).

For me, it felt like Tarkovsky (whom I love) taken to the next level, and it was splendidly successful. We didn't read the synopsis from the Cremaster web site until after the film, at which point the purely sensuous (not sensual, to my eye, though there is a modest amount of ritual nudity in the film) experience of the film became much more richly symbolic.

It's the story of the Apprentice Mason, his boss the Architect, and the construction of the Chrysler building. It's about ambition, greed, selfishness, destruction, betrayal, absurdity, ascension, evolution, the plight of the working class (my interpretation), and the Babel-based hunger for a tower that will pierce the heavens and spill their celestial essence onto our skin.

For Mormons, it contains a large amount of Masonic symbolism, which will remind them of Joseph and Brigham's temple endowment. Personally I found this a fascinating approach for a cultural Mormon to explore some of its sacred symbols from a distance, without revealing any forbidden truths and without embarrassing the church but allowing aware viewers to explore the symbols.

A simple example of the film's richness (there are countless others): the Apprentice climbs the elevator shaft of the Chrysler building with wire, and the maitre d' attaches them to an ornament over the top of the elevators' doors, then plays them like a giant lyre, singing a haunting Gaelic ballad to his own accompaniment.

It's not a film for the squeamish: Serial killer Gary Gilmore is dug from soil/manure, emaciated and gasping. The Apprentice is tortured and forced to swallow Gilmore in his bizarre sarcophagus, resulting in a visually surprising prolapse of his rectum beneath a ritually modified genital appliance (it looks like a plastic anemone). There are two gory deaths, a race of putrescent horses. You will never look at the NY Guggenheim (or the Chrysler Tower) the same again.

So, the precis, at the end: not a crowd pleaser, but for die-hard aesthetes, an original, overwhelming film. I recommend it highly but exclusively to its target audience, art-house liberals. I'm anxious to see the others in his 5 part series, though, as I understand it, Barney only allows them to be shown at art museums and similar venues.

--  
Yours,
 
Samuel Brown, MD
Massachusetts General Hospital
sam@vecna.com