Double Feature
Tonight’s double feature was two great art house films filmed in great houses of art--“The Order,” a portion of the third part of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark.
This is my first exposure to the Cremaster Cycle. I suppose having seen the rest will make this make a little more sense, but I don’t really know. (Cremaster 1 is apparently a 50 minute ballet with a woman dragging two miniature Goodyear Blimps around the blue turf at Boise State’s football field.) “The Order” is I believe the third of six parts of Cremaster 3, which was the last of the 5 part cycle to be released, and in its 30 minutes it follows a man in a bright orange kilt, matching orange wig, and blue argyle leg warmers climb up and down the spiral ramp of Guggenheim Museum in New York through five “degrees”:
Got all that? Me neither. But the DVD of it, has one video track for each Degree that runs throughout the film. I didn’t fully understand what was going on in the film going into it, and so I started with the 1st Degree, and so I got just 15 minutes of lamblike kickline girls kicking the wall of the Guggenheim. All in all, as odd as this sounds, I do want to see more of the cycle, and even worse, it really makes me want to make my own incomprehensible art film. Look out friends when I come looking for a favor.
Russian Ark is really quite amazing. I think it’s tagline sums it up best: “2000 Actors. 300 Years of Russian History. 33 Rooms at the Hermitage Museum. 3 Live Orchestras. 1 Single Continuous Shot.” Tilman Büttner must be mentioned. He operated the steadicam during the 90 tour through the Hermitage. How on earth could he do this? The crew only had access to the Hermitage for one day, and the first three attempts ended shortly due to technical problems, but they got it on the last possible try. Plus, Büttner speaks only German and director Sokurov speaks only Russian. Amazing. Simply amazing. And complicatiedly amazing too.
This is my first exposure to the Cremaster Cycle. I suppose having seen the rest will make this make a little more sense, but I don’t really know. (Cremaster 1 is apparently a 50 minute ballet with a woman dragging two miniature Goodyear Blimps around the blue turf at Boise State’s football field.) “The Order” is I believe the third of six parts of Cremaster 3, which was the last of the 5 part cycle to be released, and in its 30 minutes it follows a man in a bright orange kilt, matching orange wig, and blue argyle leg warmers climb up and down the spiral ramp of Guggenheim Museum in New York through five “degrees”:
- 1st Degree: A kickline of dancing girls dress in lamb constumes.
- 2nd Degree: Agnostic Front vs. Murphy’s Law, a battle of two New York hardcore bands
- 3rd Degree: Aimee Mullins, the runway model/motivational speaker/world’s fastest woman on prosthetic legs, plays some sort of princess with the symbols of Free Masonry cast in plexiglass in her headdress to go along with her plexiglass prosthetic legs, but then turns suddenly into a cheetah woman, with a different pair of prosthetic legs that look like a cheetah’s hind legs. Like most of the film, it’s rather creepy and strangely beautiful at the same time.
- 4th Degree: I don’t know how to describe this.
- 5th Degree: A guy, who apparently is in another portion of the cycle, shovels molten Vaseline onto the floor at the top of the Guggenheim so that it can flow down a trough through the lower degrees.
Got all that? Me neither. But the DVD of it, has one video track for each Degree that runs throughout the film. I didn’t fully understand what was going on in the film going into it, and so I started with the 1st Degree, and so I got just 15 minutes of lamblike kickline girls kicking the wall of the Guggenheim. All in all, as odd as this sounds, I do want to see more of the cycle, and even worse, it really makes me want to make my own incomprehensible art film. Look out friends when I come looking for a favor.
Russian Ark is really quite amazing. I think it’s tagline sums it up best: “2000 Actors. 300 Years of Russian History. 33 Rooms at the Hermitage Museum. 3 Live Orchestras. 1 Single Continuous Shot.” Tilman Büttner must be mentioned. He operated the steadicam during the 90 tour through the Hermitage. How on earth could he do this? The crew only had access to the Hermitage for one day, and the first three attempts ended shortly due to technical problems, but they got it on the last possible try. Plus, Büttner speaks only German and director Sokurov speaks only Russian. Amazing. Simply amazing. And complicatiedly amazing too.
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