DRAWING RESTRAINT 9

By Admin

Matthew Barney, whose Cremaster film series was the cover story in the Spring 2003 issue of Filmmaker, has completed a new feature with a soundtrack composed by his wife, Bjork. The 150-minute-long film, Drawing Restraint 9 premieres this week in the Horizons section of 62nd Venice International Film Festival; it will also screen at the forthcoming Toronto International Film Festival.

According to the Web site of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, which recently concluded a retrospective of Barney’s Drawing Restraint series — a project he has worked on continuously since 1987 — Drawing Restraint 9 “is an abstract fairy tale carried by striking visuals and music (much like opera), which draws its inspiration from Japanese cultural tradition, the history of petroleum-based energy, and the evolution of the whale. Framed within the Japanese whaling tradition, the story draws an elliptical connection between prehistoric fossil fuel, the prehistoric land mammal as a pre- condition for the modern whale, whale oil as a primary energy source, and the contemporary condition of the diesel fueled factory ship.”

Bjork’s Web site immodestly describes Drawing Restraint 9 as “the first creative collaboration of two of the most protean, dynamic forces in music and fine art.”

“[Barney's] latest work, the two-hour-and-fifteen-minute magnum opus Drawing Restraint 9, was shot in Nagasaki Bay on board the Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru.

“Its core idea is the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity, a theme it symbolically tracks through the construction and transformation of a vast sculpture of liquid vaseline, called ‘The Field,’ which is molded, poured, bisected and reformed on the deck of the ship over the course of the film.

“Barriers hold form in place, and when they are removed, the film tracks the descent of form into states of sensual surrender and formal atrophy; this shift in the physical state of the sculpture is symbolically mirrored through the narrative of The Guests, two occidental visitors to the ship played in the film by Matthew Barney and Bjork, who we first see taken on board, groomed, bathed and dressed in mammal … Read the rest

HURRICANE HOUSING

By Scott Macaulay

MoveOn.org has launched a new project, HurricaneHousing.org, a website at which you can post offers to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina with free housing. If you are able to house someone displaced by the storm, head on over to the site.… Read the rest

CBGB, R.I.P.

By Admin

… Read the rest

LEGGAT MOVES WEST

By Admin

Congratulations to friend and Filmmaker columnist Graham Leggat (pictured above with his doppleganger, Moby), who announced yesterday that he’s leaving his post as director of communications at the Film Society of Lincoln Center to take on the executive director job at the San Francisco Film Society. The organization runs the San Francisco Film Festival, among many other programs. I first met Graham in 2000, when I, a very unqualified journalist, arrived in New York to cover the New York Film Festival for the Creative Planet website. Graham and I hit it off, and a day later I was sitting in the Essex House interviewing Catherine Deneuve and Bjork for Dancer in the Dark. When I finally left L.A. and moved back home to the city, he was one of the first people I called for some guidance, and we’ve since become good friends. He’ll be greatly missed here in New York — let’s hope that he, his wife Lily, and his little boy Willie come back from time to time to say hi.… Read the rest