Saturday, April 29, 2006

Pretty Bizarre

Matthew Barney makes these very strange visual arts movies. Tonight I saw his latest one, "Drawing Restraint 9," on which he collaborated with his significant other, Bjork -- she did the music and co-starred.

To me, his movies are much more about beautiful images on the screen than they are about the plot. But I can't figure out how to describe the images.

Not that the plot is much easier, but here goes: a man (Barney) and a woman (Bjork) go aboard a Japanese whaling ship (the real-life Nisshin Maru) where they are married in a Shinto Wedding Ceremony after an elaborate tea ceremony and then they begin flensing each other after they develop blowholes -- in the meantime the ship's crew brings aboard an enormous whale shaped fossil and they perform a ceremony around it and then lower it below the deck where it disintegrates and finally the crew dismantles a large container of whale blubber and it loses its shape on the deck.

Weird enough for you?

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