CREMASTER 4 / CREMASTER 5

Matthew Barney's camera has dreamed dreams. He has brought them back with him, in his “Cremaster” series of avant-garde features, numbered one to five (yet filmed out of sequence). Each independent narrative is more opulent and accomplished than the last at plunging the viewer into another reality, a fantastic mindscape of pansexual symbolism and themes that seem to derive from legends ancient, modern, and yet-to-be. CREMASTER 4 heads for the seas off Britain, for a phantasmic shoreline motorbike race run by creatures of myth and fantasy, with some peculiarly biomechanoid aspects to the pit crew. CREMASTER 5 opens in a vast opera house where the sole patron, the Queen of Chains (Ursula Andress, regal in her glass-globe hairpiece) is the one who sings, in untranslated Magyar, while her thoughts wander to a lost love, and water-nymphs perform a bizarre fertility ritual with a satyr in pools beneath her dais. Shot in the Isle of Man, Budapest, and New York – Barney has stuck to locations in the same latitudes throughout the cycle – these are the final movements in a visual symphony composed by fimmaker/performance artist Barney, a hypnotically beautiful and unique multimedia vision.