Cremaster 2
| The Cremaster Cycle | |
|---|---|
Matthew Barney's 'Field Emblem' which is a recurrent motif in all 5 films
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| Directed by | Matthew Barney |
| Written by | Matthew Barney |
| Starring |
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| Music by | Jonathan Bepler |
| Distributed by | Palm Pictures |
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Release date
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1994-2002 |
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Running time
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398 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| 4 | 1994 | ||||
| 1 | 1995 | ||||
| 5 | 1997 | ||||
| 2 | 1999 | ||||
| 3 | 2002 | ||||
| production order of the films, compared with numerical order |
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The Cremaster Cycle is a series of five feature-length films, together with related sculptures, photographs, drawings, and artist's books, created by American visual artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney.
The Cremaster Cycle was made over a period of eight years (1994–2002) and culminated in a major museum exhibition organized by Nancy Spector of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which traveled to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Musée d'art Moderne in Paris from 2002-03. Barney's longtime collaborator Jonathan Bepler composed and arranged the soundtracks for the films.
Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector has described the Cremaster cycle (1994–2002) as "a self-enclosed aesthetic system." The cycle includes the films as well as photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations the artist produced in conjunction with each episode. Its conceptual departure point is the male cremaster muscle, the primary function of which is to raise and lower the testes in response to temperature.
The project is filled with anatomical allusions to the position of the reproductive organs during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation: Cremaster 1 represents the most "ascended" or undifferentiated state, Cremaster 5 the most "descended" or differentiated.
The cycle repeatedly returns to those moments during early sexual development in which the outcome of the process is still unknown — in Barney's metaphoric universe, these moments represent a condition of pure potentiality. As the cycle evolved over eight years, Barney looked beyond biology as a way to explore the creation of form, employing narrative models from other realms, such as biography, mythology, and geology.
The films were not made in numerical order (1–5), but rather in the order 4, 1, 5, 2, 3 – precisely, 4 in 1994, 1 in 1995, 5 in 1997, 2 in 1999, 3 in 2002. The numerical order is the thematic order, while in order of production the films increase in production quality and ambition, and they can alternatively be viewed in any order, as different views of a set of themes and preoccupations.
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