Cremaster 1 (1996) User Reviews

7/10

[desperateliving · 7/10 · 22 October 2004]

It's a bit difficult to look at this film, because it's hard to figure out what it is. At first you think it's rife with symbolism, that useless tactic that can be "figured out" and then explained as great movie-making. But the way Barney forces us through long, long takes -- silent -- I think is intended to make us evaluate the images not as symbols but simply as images, and that's a lot more artistically credible, to my mind. Yes, Barney has offered up his explanation of the film as being some visual allegory of gonads and whatnot, but I think that's really only interesting from a little joke perspective. The importance of the movie is in the way it resists explanation. It's hypnotic in its way -- you could watch the dancers on the football field emulate the grape formations in the blimps above all day.

There are some really strange images we see, the women picking out grapes from underneath a table, or the molds of Vaseline atop them. But Barney isn't much of a filmmaker (there is very simple editing, and the film looks as if it was filmed in the '70s); he's an artist who happens to be using film as his medium at the moment. For this reason the film doesn't feel alive as a film -- it is cinematic, a succession of moving static images, but it's really just a bunch of posing. From the smoking fashion models and from Barney. 7/10

David Lynch + the Coen Brothers = Matthew Barney's Cremaster 1

[Latheman-9 · 5/10 · 20 June 2003]

This, the first in Barney's five-part Cremaster cycle of films (but the second made; the cycle is not numbered in chronological order), blends the choreography of a Busby Berkeley musical placed in an off-kilter context, and in so doing reminded me of the Coen Brothers' movies, with the slow-paced weirdness of early David Lynch. None of the Cremaster films employ dialogue -- they are essentially visual/aural experiences. This one suffers badly from poor cinematography, on several occasions being just on the edge of going out of focus. Of course, that might have been intentional. Moreover, the print I viewed was in bad shape even though it was advertised as being "brand new." If it was, then the master it was made from must be in a sorry state indeed. There is no plot to speak of; after all, this is an "art" film, so one just has to sit back and enjoy the imagery. How one interprets it is purely subjective, of course, although the overriding emphasis on genitalia and reproduction is impossible to miss. I consider this the weakest film in the cycle, but fortunately it is relatively brief at forty minutes. Rating: 5/10.

Unblessed Soles

[tedg · 2 December 2006]

I'm going to comment on these one at a time as I see them. And I will see them in numerical order — there seems to be some difference of opinion as to what is best, but I'll work with the numbers that artist has assigned.

I come to this as someone concerned with cinematic narrative, explorations, experiments, adventures. And of course matters sexual are always worth tracing deeply.

If you don't know this, it is the first, numerically of five films that are the purest that can be termed "art" films. They aren't generally available via entertainment channels; parts of these can be viewed in a few museums. Sculptures featured in the films are sold by an art dealer who provides funding for the films. Seen commercially, the films are the context woven around the objects, a technique that in the ordinary world would be called advertising.

So starting out, there's a narrative here, the oldest one: "Buy this." Or more sensitively: "associate yourself with this in order to inherit the context we will plant in you." The film experience by itself is lovely, and if it weren't the beginning of a journey into the unknown, I would recommend it without qualification. I fear that marrying this man will bring unhappiness; there's something about giving the illusion of depth that doesn't reward serious investment. And films are always about serious investment; life is film.

What you'll see is choreography on a playing field, observed and controlled from paired blimps. More precisely and obviously the control is the hidden, newly stirring female impulse, that most female of impulses. Hidden and unacknowledged, but powerful.

All the humans we see are women. All the actions are those related to wombness, fruiting, exposing, silent weaving. You might think of it as eroticism for smart people. Pre-erotic.

What makes me hesitate in folding my dreams into this is the apparent obsession with notation. Its a dangerous thing for a sculptor to confuse shape with form. We'll see.

Meanwhile, it such a perfect notion, this business about us, the game of sex, influence from an abstract sky, ordered choreography by blind, hidden, newly stirring goddesses. Fruit.

Of the visual conventions, one is jarringly inelegant. Grapes provide the Steiner corpuscles of being here. Our twinned white goddesses purloin and internalize them, then eject or excrete them to appear as the action on the ground, skirts that vaginally speak to the world.

But where do our goddesses express these fruit? Through flares attached to the soles of one shoe. Its jarringly out of sync with everything else and one can only assume that among all the clever notions of flow, our artist couldn't imagine something more organic that stayed abstract but was connected to skin, or vessel.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

A Waste

[framptonhollis · 3/10 · 11 October 2016]

"Cremaster 1" manages to be even worse than "Cremaster 4" was! It is packed with that pretentious, over the top sexual symbolism that I so utterly LOATHE! This trashy "art" film is pure eye rolling material, and, on top of that, it is pure eye closing material, because I felt like falling sleep after the first 5 minutes of this train wreck!

Despite my obvious anger against this film, there were a couple of things I liked about it. For the most part, the scenes taking place in the stadium were pretty interesting and visually appealing, and the overall set and costume design was very well done. Other than that, "Cremaster 1" was simply a tedious and obnoxious waste of time. It replaces the uncomfortable and disgusting nature of "Cremaster 4" with slow, painful boredom. As a fan of films like "Satantango", a 7 hour long black and white comic drama made up of long takes, and even "Gerry", a film that is infamous for its slowness, I thought that "Cremaster 1" was overly slow paced-and it's only 40 minutes long!

This is the most needlessly slow and stupid experimental film that I have ever seen, and I have seen quite a few experimental films that I found to be silly, but those seem like "Citizen Kane" compared to this trash!

However, I have made it my duty to watch every film in Matthew Barney's "Cremaster Cycle" in its entirety. No matter how boring or silly or obnoxious these films may be, I have committed myself to watching them! It is something I shall achieve! Go (Insert My Name Here) ! Go!

The emperor's new cremaster

[JohnFilmfreak · 1/10 · 15 December 2013]

This is not art. This is not film. This is nothing. A whole lot of nothing. 40 minutes of nothing. It's all a big joke from a screwy artist, who apparently wants to see how much he can get away with. And the only redeeming factor is that a lot of people apparently buys into the hilarious idea that this is anything more than nothing. Anyone who's fooled into wasting their time on this garbage is a sucker, and the only one laughing is the "director" Matthew Barney.

As such, it would actually be quite interesting seeing a documentary about the snobby art-societies where this is accepted as anything more than nothing. Because what value do those who value nothing actually have themselves?

part of a modern art classic

[Chris_Docker · 9/10 · 20 March 2004]

The Cremaster Cycle 9/10

The Cremaster Cycle is a series of five films shot over eight years. Although they can be seen individually, the best experience is seeing them all together (like Wagner's Ring Cycle) - and also researching as much as you can beforehand. To give you an idea of the magnitude, it has been suggested that their fulfilment confirms creator Matthew Barney as the most important American artist of his generation (New York Times Magazine).

The Cremaster films are works of art in the sense that the critical faculties you use whilst watching them are ones you might more normally use in, say, the Tate Modern, than in an art house cinema. They are entirely made up of symbols, have only the slimmest of linear plots, and experiencing them leaves you with a sense of awe, of more questions and inspirations than closed-book answers. The imagery is at once grotesque, beautiful, challenging, puzzling and stupendous. Any review can only hope to touch on the significance of such an event, but a few clues might be of interest, so for what it's worth ...

Starting with the title. The 'Cremaster' is a muscle that acts to retract the testes. This keeps the testes warm and protected from injury. (If you keep this in mind as you view the piece it will be easier to find other clues and make sense of the myriad allusions to anatomical development, sexual differentiation, and the period of embryonic sexual development - including the period when the outcome is still unknown. The films, which can be viewed in any order (though chronologically is probably better than numerically) range from Cremaster 1 (most 'ascended' or undifferentiated state) to Cremaster 5 (most 'descended'). The official Cremaster website contains helpful synopses.)

Cremaster 1 features four air hostesses in each of two identical cabins, centrepieces sculpted from vaseline on respectively green and red grapes. An androgynous looking woman beneath each works a hole in the tablecloth and plucks grapes which direct choreographed patterns of dancing chorus girls. This seems to suggest the splitting and multiplying cells of a still androgynous gonadal system.

The Guggenheim Museum (which houses a parallel exhibition) describes the Cremaster Cycle as "a self-enclosed aesthetic system consisting of five feature-length films that explore processes of creation." As film, the Cremaster Cycle is one to experience in the cinema if you have the opportunity to do so, or to experience and re-experience at leisure on DVD (the boxed set is promised for late 2004 and will be a gem for lovers of art-cinema fusion).

Stays very underwhelming

[Horst_In_Translation · 2/10 · 14 May 2016]

"Cremaster 1" is actually the second entry in the Cremaster series by American writer and director Matthew Barney. At 40 minutes, it is the shortest installment we have here and these films got longer and longer with each part. 40 minutes is still too long if you ask me. It dragged a lot on several occasions. Instead of going for cheap shock value like the first film (Cremaster 4), this one relies more on artistry, aesthetics and music. But it came pretty short in all these areas. I cannot see any cinematic value in these experimental films and I can only repeat myself that this would have been a bearable (not a good) watch in the single-digit minute runtime department. I do not recommend "Cremaster1" at all. It is certainly pretty different compared to how the series began, but it is just as bad. Major thumbs-down.

Bizarre and Richly Imaginative

[alexduffy2000 · 8/10 · 31 May 2003]

Matthew Barney's highly symbolic film is done as bizarre musical, taking place simultaneously in two twin Goodyear blimps and on a football field below. If you don't have patience with art films, you wont like this, but if you do, it's a strange film about fertility and birth. It features 1930's style choreography on a football field filled with female models dressed up as whirling dervishes, there are overhead shots of them make formations of vaginas, eggs being fertilized, and the fertilized egg subdividing. On the blimps is "Goodyear" (played by actress "Marti Domination") who crawls around on both blimps simultaneously(?) taking grapes and choreographing the dancers below. Sounds bizarre? It is, but at 40 minutes it's just about the right length and I didn't look at my watch once. Worth seeing if you're into this kind of arty stuff. 8 out of 10.

Vaginal dance from the sky

[chaos-rampant · 19 June 2012]

Step the second in my voyage through the cinematic constellation of the Cremaster films. The cycle of five films released over the course of 8 years, apparently derives its moniker from a testicular muscle in the human body and is meant to represent the onset of the male gender in the biological formation of the fetus.

The guy responsible for these is primarily a sculptor, so you will see often basic filmmaking but with an eye for sculpted space, emphasis on surfaces instead of narrative. I bet he loves Kubrick.

Additionally, he seems to have the notion that the five films taken together can also substitute for the creative process, it's really boring if you read up on what he has to say. And this is the thing for me. He seems to be a pompous boring man. He's fond of these stale symbolic notations where a vase supposedly stands for beauty and really labors under the weight of having some sort of layered system that explains the bulk of his work.

Compare him to someone like Resnais or Ruiz, artists who thrive in the spontaneity and mystery of the medium, and Barney comes off as hard and fussy about trivial insights. You can see the films then read up on keys he has provided elsewhere, and that is that.

But this works, this is something to settle in. It is still not deeply centered, in the sense that I was hoping with these films for a cosmology that folds different worlds, different facets of vision into single-pointed concentration of vision coming into being, and Barney is still consumed with grapes trickling from a shoe to take on the ground the shape of ovaries.

Nevertheless, this works because it is less about notation and more about gently sculpted abstract feel.

It is a simple thing, at the top we have two zeppelins - the 'ovaries' - circling the skies and in each blimp is the same woman in lingerie hidden in the cramped space beneath a table and arranging grapes into different shapes. Meanwhile, hostesses in each zeppelin keep staring out of darkened ports in the hull. Interiors are immaculately white, Barney's shorthand for purity. Bodies of all these women are palesmooth, languid skin moving with constraint that is a frigid wish for post-coital melancholy, there is a lot of posturing and vacant looks between them like in one of those ads about perfume.

So she keeps play-acting with grapes, they keep looking as though guarding against something or nonchalantly curious.

But down below is a stadium and twin choruses of girls in dancehall attire assemble and dance. They assemble as the grapes do up above, each time a new shape, this is the stale, symmetrical part.

The beauty is all in the co-ordinated sweeps, the dance between the innocent woman above and the arena where her impulse to give shape is being danced out like a number from a splashy Busby Berkeley musical. If you have seen any of Berkeley's films, you know the big show was never random spectacle, but always the voluptuous expression of the players as they danced out feelings they had been struggling with for the entire film, all of it let out on the stage.

We don't have any plot here and only the dreamy number. We have only fresh radiant beings and soothing Hollywood music. We have rosycolored air that is prepubescent not-yet sex, pure emotion.