This year the Karlovy Vary IFF programme offers an exclusive presentation of an artist pushing the boundaries of the cinematographic world: MATTHEW BARNEY (*1967), deemed the most prominent artist in the US today.
His world renown was won by the five-part Cremaster cycle– a symbolic stream of superlative imagery bearing on myth, sex, death, America, biology, architecture and more. In addition to this grandiose project, the festival plans to host the film Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), created by Barney in cohorts with his partner, the Icelandic star Björk.

CREMASTER 1-5 (1994-2002)
Cremaster is a mingled world of fanciful symbols and images that develop themselves in five films. The medical term evoked in the name refers to the muscle that controls the contraction of the testicles. The cycle is conceived as a great parable of prenatal development – from the incipient equilibrium to the conflict within the organism, when the sex characteristics drag the system over to a masculine or feminine pole.
Barney has entered a world full of super kinetic stories with what is in essence a visual film. World-wide recognition came in turn, and Barney became a prominent artist before the age of 35.

In the films, Matthew Barney himself portrays the enigmatic figures of a satyr and a Masonic apprentice. Surprising personalities appear in other roles: the writer Norman Mailer, the Swedish film star Ursula Andress, the sculptor Richard Serra, drummer Dave Lombardo (former member of the hardcore rock band Slayer) and Aimee Mullins, an American athlete and model with amputated legs.

The five episodes came about in non-chronological order in a number of different parts of the world. Barney turns the New York Chrysler Building into the Maypole of the world, and a river of Vaseline runs through the galleries of the Guggenheim Museum. He creates a ballet of luxury limousines and crushes them into cubes. Motorcycle races are unleashed on the English Isle of Man, places like an Art Nouveau spa in Budapest are alive in this symbolic world with unique characters – as are statues, costumes, and airships.


The elaborate and incredibly successful Cremaster exhibition in New York´s Guggenheim Museum showed how Barney augments his films to include sculpture, photography, and fixtures. The film cycle however, as the heart of the work, is shown separately at film festivals and in cultural centres around the world. It will be introduced in Karlovy Vary by a representative of the worldwide distribution company Celluloid Dreams.

A Wagneresque Ring of the Nibelung for the 21st century is what they call the sophisticated five-part gesamtkustwerk, which received not only a rapturous response but has also, as an intrinsically controversial work, been accused of being self-absorbed, elitist, and excessively esoteric. “From a detached point of view you could say that to understand all of the hidden content in Cremaster, we would need a guidebook as thick as Encyclopaedia Britannica. But even as it is, a fantastic, indecipherable riddle offering a deluge of one-of-a-kind images, Cremaster fascinates viewers in scores of countries,” says journalist Pavel Klusák, curator of the Barney program at Karlovy Vary.