Matthew Barney Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The seemingly unkillable Norman Mailer is dead of renal failure. He was 84. As well they should do, most obituaries are noting Mailer's nigh-Nobel worthy body of work--his supreme novel of World War II, for instance, The Naked and the Dead, filmed in a heavily bowdlerized version by Raoul Walsh. Mailer's less known work as an actor and director needs to be memorialized separately. As a larger than life personality, given to public brawls, with his noble battered oversized profile worthy of any senator or any prize-fighter, Mailer was made for cinema. Milos Forman used that big silhouette of Mailer's to play the architect Stanford White in Ragtime. Paralyzingly boring avant garde director Matthew Barney co-starred Mailer as Harry Houdini in Cremaster 2. (1999). The TV film version of Mailer's famous bio of murderer Gary Gilmore, The Executioner's Song made Tommy Lee Jones a star. So Barney, last seen on screen filleting Bjork with Japanese whale-flensing knives, seems to have hired Mailer as an allusion to Gilmore's belief that he was a descendant of the famed magician.

Some of the longer obits mention the kind of Mailer misbehavior that broke out, whenever there was a camera near. Most infamous is Mailer's chomping on Rip Torn's ear on the set of his 1970 film Maidstone, after Torn came at him with a hammer. Here's the footage of that famous bout, complete with swanky French subtitles. We're hearing less about Wild 90, where Mailer got into the face of a Doberman Pinscher and outbarked him. I think he was the first actor to have done this, but it's something you see frequently on screen today, whenever some actor wants to show that he's tougher than a dog. Pauline Kael later summed up by saying that on film Mailer "tried to will a work of art into existence, without going through the steps of making it."

Less seen, even, than Mailer's directoral efforts is the 1979 Hegedus/Pennybaker Town Bloody Hall, a documentary version of Mailer's stark bollocky crazy book-lengh essay Prisoner of Sex, in which Mailer clashes antlers with a tag-team of feminist all-stars, including Germaine Greer, Village Voice poet Jill Johnston, Betty Friedan and Susan Sontag. Also obscure is the English version of Mailer's An American Dream, risibly AKA'd as See You in Hell Darling with Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh and Aug 1966 Playmate of the Month Susan Denberg as Ruta the German maid. Some of these films were shown at The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer, which played at Lincoln Center in NYC this summer; here's Michael Chaiken's interview with Mailer about his films. And perhaps A.O. Scott's positive review of the retrospective gave the old self-promoter some pleasure.

According to its press page, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (now in its ninth year) is "the premier documentary film festival in the United States." Whether it's that or not, the festival, which takes place over four outrageously packed days in Durham, NC and runs April 6-9 this year, has a great slate of films lined up for its 2006 installment. The competition slate includes the audience-friendly Air Guitar Nation; Angel Makers, a story about 51 Hungarian women arrest for poisoning "the men in their lives" in 1929; the world premiere of "A transgressive rock and roll drag show featuring subversive and absurdist performances, a fierce soundtrack, and a transcendent spirit" called Filthy Gorgeous, The Trannyshack Story; and Matthew Barney: No Restraint, a sort of The Burden of Dreams to Barney's Drawing Restraint 9.

Also featured this year is a sidebar about Hurricane Katrina, as well as a special focus on class in America, examined through a wide variety of lenses.

[Thanks, Peter]

Well, no one can accuse the people at the Berlin Film Festival for being conservative: according to The Guardian, this year's jury "will include a veteran Bollywood producer, a renowned cinematographer and an artist with a fixation on the muscle that controls testicular contractions." Doesn't that just roll right off the tongue?

The men described above are, in turn, Yash Chopra, Janusz Kaminski, who has won two Oscars for his work with Steven Spielberg, and the talented, unpredicatable Matthew Barney (you know, the guy with with the whale movie). Joining that trio are five other panelists who continue the trend towards diversity: South Korean actor Lee Yeong-ae, Charlotte Rampling (who will serve as the Jury's chair), actor Armin Mueller-Stahl, Fred Roos (whose productions range from Apocalypse Now to Lost in Translation), and Dutch director Marleen Gorris. This is possibly the greatest jury of all time - what a great mix of ages, backgrounds, specialities, and interests. I can't wait to see what this crew comes up with when the time comes to hand out the awards on February 18.

In what will most likely turn out to be the rights-acquisition equivalent of throwing money down a hole, the ever-optimistic people at IFC Films recently picked up the American theatrical rights to artist Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9. Doesn't ring a bell? Come on, you remember - it's the movie on a boat, with the tub of Vaseline on its deck in which Björk and her boyfriend Barney hang out, turning into whales! Yeah, that one. And now, thanks to IFC, we'll all get to experience the film's magic for ourselves, starting at the end of March. Thank goodness.

Look, I know Barney has a fair number of fans, as does Björk - but in what world could this be a useful acquisition for IFC? I mean, very few people are going to spend a lazy afternoon watching this one just out of curiosity. How could the cost of buying the rights possibly be covered by the profits? It just seems completely impossible.