SFIFF: Drawing Restraint 9
While mainstream America's attention has been focused on TomKat's recent offspring and Brangelina's pending progeny, we joined San Francisco's arthouse hipster crowd at the Kabuki late Wednesday night for the local unveiling of Drawing Restraint 9, the creative brainchild of Matthew "most important American artist of his generation" Barney and the inimitable Björk. It was screened as part of the SF International Film Festival in collaboration with SFMoMA, which mounts a major solo exhibition of Barney's work on June 23.
We were quite excited about the event, not just because we're Björkophiles and longtime Barney followers, but because it's an exceptionally well-suited creative pairing: two artists who both think unflinchingly about sexuality, who are meticulous in their opulent choreographing of sight/sound, whose consciousnesses seem to be completely unaware of any boundary separating reality and mythology, and who are real-life lovers playing out the consummation of a relationship.
A full house settled into the theater at 11:30PM to listen to Matthew Barney introduce the film, which runs just under 2 1/2 hours. After the lights came back on around 2:10AM, we overheard one attendee say, "Yo, wake up. That was some f***ed-up s***."
More about whale intestines, clowns, cannibalism, and Matthew Barney's penis, as well as some viewing tips, in the second part of this post.
Friend of SFist M. C-, contributing.
There's no shortage of press about Drawing Restraint 9, so we'll leave the background info to other sources. A good starting point is a particularly intelligent and well-crafted piece by Matmos's Drew Daniel, which is posted on Björk's DR9 web page.
The film is part of Barney's ongoing Drawing Restraint series, in which he explores how form emerges or is strengthened through resistance or restraint. Drawing Restraint is also the title of the SFMoMA show, which will show DR9 at least once daily (Wednesdays excluded) for three months. Since San Francisco audiences will have plenty of opportunity in upcoming months to see this film, we thought we'd provide a few practical viewing tips:
* Know what ambergris is and what it looks like before stepping into the theater. It will prevent you from wondering for an hour why everyone's so happy about smelling a giant grey turd.
* Keep an eye out for Björk in a red cape and hiking boots: adorable!
* Read the poem "Vessel, host, occidental guests" (scroll down), so that you have an idea of what the Noh theater performers are chanting while 15 minutes of profoundly discomfiting imagery is playing out on screen.
* Naturally, be prepared to see Matthew Barney naked. (During his talk prior to the screening, we caught ourselves thinking, not only has he shown us his perineum, he's actually titled artwork after it.)
* The clown at the end is the Petrolatum Spirit. We can see the lightbulbs already.
* Pay particular attention to the scene with the pearl divers, where a group of Rhinemaiden-like women, dressed entirely in white, go through deep-breathing exercises just before submerging themselves to search of oysters. The soundtrack for this scene features Tagaq, an Inuit throat singer who contributed to Medúlla, and Mayumi Miyata, who plays a handheld reed pipe instrument called the sho. To our eyes and ears, this was the most striking meeting of sound and image, with the divers' breath emerging through Tagaq and the sho, the oysters' treasures reflected in Miyata's hair. It was truly lovely.
Portions of this film contain nudity and violent imagery (such as Björk and Matthew Barney slicing open each other's legs with flensing knives and feeding each other pieces of their raw, carved flesh like sashimi) that may not be appropriate for all viewers. This film is not rated.