USA / Japan,
2005, 150 min
Shown in 2006
CREDITS
- dir
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Matthew Barney
- prod
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Matthew Barney, Barbara Gladstone
- scr
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Matthew Barney
- cam
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Peter Strietmann
- editor
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Matthew Barney, Christopher Seguine, Peter Strietmann
- mus
-
Björk
- cast
-
Björk, Matthew Barney, Sosui Oshima, Tomoyuki Ogawa
- source
-
IFC Films. EMAIL: PKINDLON@ifcfilms.com,
-
COMMENTS
Matthew Barney in attendance.
OTHER
It is a dream collaboration. Matthew Barney, the most groundbreaking and celebrated American visual artist of the past decade, joins forces with Björk, equally inspired and adored as a musical innovator. Drawing Restraint 9 is the product of these two remarkable minds. It is also, in ways only they could conceive, a love story. In Japan's Nagasaki Bay, two Occidental Guests (Barney and Björk) arrive separately on board the Nisshin Maru, a whaling ship. On the deck of the ship an enormous mold is filled with hot petroleum jelly. As the liquid cools to create a disturbing, enigmatic sculptural form, the Guests perform an elaborate series of rituals. They are bathed, shorn and then groomed in spectacular costumes of skin, fur and bone inspired by traditional Shinto wedding dress. In the film's only dialogue sequence, they take part in a tea ceremony during which a priest recounts the history of the ship. Just then the chamber floods, which leads to an even more shocking transformation in the couple. It is here that Barney's astonishing gift for staging collisions of myth and biology reaches its peak. Drawing Restraint 9 finds an entirely new iconography in the intersections of Japan's marine culture, its history of whaling and the peculiar sculpture of mammalian forms. For the first time, Barney has a collaborator who can match him, sound for sight. Björk's soundtrack for the film is powerfully emotive, massing orchestral and electronic textures, an ancient Japanese reed pipe and her own protean voice. It is the perfect complement to Barney's images, just as Björk's physical presence as the woman gives his visual vocabulary a new tension and depth. Barney's five-film Cremaster cycle was a monumental achievement, but fundamentally a personal one, creating a unique and haunting system of symbols. Drawing Restraint—based on the idea that resistance makes muscles stronger—has been Barney's ongoing project since 1987. Drawing Restraint 9, with its spooky parade of sinewy machines, white-robed pearl divers and the choreographed rites of two devoted lovers, marks a dazzling leap forward not for one artist, but two.
—Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival
FACTOID #171
When Festival Executive Director Claude Jarman addressed journalists at the 1977 Festival press conference, he announced that the SFIFF was launching an ’important experiment’ by screening films at the Castro Theatre (at the urging of Mayor George Moscone to take the Festival to the neighborhoods) The experiment must have worked, as the Festival still has screenings at the Castro to this day, in addition to many other satellite venues.
