Cremaster 1
USA 1996. Director: Matthew Barney 
Cast: Marti Domination, Gemma Bourdon Smith, Kathleen Crepeau, Nina Kotov, Jessica Sherwood, Tanyth Berkeley

Matthew Barney does Busby Berkeley, sort of, in Cremaster 1, an odd and arch musical revue choreographed on the blue Astroturf of a football stadium in Boise, Idaho — Barney’s hometown. Two Goodyear Blimps float above the field, each with a cabin of four flight attendants.Platinum starlet Goodyear, clad in provocative attire, is in both cabins simultaneously, rearranging grapes in geometric patterns that are repeated by showgirls on the Astroturf below.“Wildly surreal . . . [Cremaster 1] represents the testicle at its least descended and is thus the most feminine of the films . . . As befits the female stage of the embryonic process, Barney himself does not appear in it” (Mark Cousins, Sight and Sound).Colour, 35mm. 40 mins.

Cremaster 2
USA 1999. Director: Matthew Barney
Cast: Norman Mailer, Matthew Barney, Lauren Pine, Scott Ewalt, Patty Griffin

Cremaster 2 offers a strange, dream-like, Cronenbergian riff on Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, about American murderer Gary Gilmore, in which Mailer argued that Gilmore might have been Harry Houdini’s grandson. A “gothic Western” featuring some jaw-droppingly gelatinous oozing organic automobiles, the film has Barney as Gilmore and Mailer himself as Harry Houdini. “A sprawling, hallucinatory quiltwork of gorgeously shot scenes and ominous organ music, all slowly unfolding a circuitous plot involving Gary Gilmore, copulating bees, members of the Gilmore clan, Houdini, a Brahma bull, the Mormon Tabernacle and landscapes ranging from Utah’s blindingly bright salt flats to the glacial ice fields of Jasper, Canada . . . A world as strangely alternate as Lewis Carroll’s” (Stephen Henry Madoff, Time). “On the biological level “[Cremaster 2] corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Barney’s abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1” (Nancy Spector, Guggenheim Museum). Colour, 35mm. 79 mins.