This week the Music Box presents all five installments of Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster” cycle of avant-garde features, plus the Chicago premiere of his latest, De Lama Lamina. Tickets are $10, and a pass good for all three programs is $24; for more information see musicboxtheatre.com.
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Cremaster 1 Sculptor, writer-director, and former football player Matthew Barney returns to Bronco Stadium in his hometown of Boise, Idaho, to stage a Busby Berkeley-style dance routine while two Goodyear blimps float overhead. Inside each blimp are four air hostesses and an elaborately set banquet table, and under each table lies a winsome figure known as Goodyear (Marti Domination), whose idly created configurations of green or purple grapes are duplicated by the dancing girls below. This slick spectacle (1995), packed with metaphors relating to procreative biology, tries very hard to impress us with its production values, but I was bored by its programmatic literalism and mechanical crosscutting. 41 min. —Jonathan Rosenbaum
Cremaster 4 With or without a comprehensible story, crosscutting is one of the least interesting forms of editing, and Barney addresses the problem much as Robert Altman did when he was on autopilot—by pretending it doesn’t exist. This lumbering avant-garde spectacular (1994) stars Barney as “the Loughton Candidate,” a tap dancing and crawling satyr juxtaposed with two motorcycle teams racing across the Isle of Man. The film invites us to consider the multiple meanings of its elaborate surrealist imagery—much of it viewed from Barney’s favorite camera position, the celestial overhead shot—but all I could think about was hype and money. The colors are characteristically lurid. 42 min. —Jonathan Rosenbaum
Program C (Cremaster 4 and 5, De Lama Lamina): Sat 9/4, 8:30 PM; Sun 9/5, 1:30 PM; Mon 9/6, 5:30 PM; Wed 9/8, 8 PM;Thu 9/9, 5 PM.
