Whatever else it is, and my playful instinct wants to proclaim it as a crypto-Titanic remake, Matthew Barney’s film portion of his Drawing Restraint series, entitled Drawing Restraint 9, is obsessed by its own assembly. Though I am familiar neither with Barney’s previous work (including the films in his Cremaster series), nor with the other parts of this installation, what I see in this film is a linear narrative tied to the construction of various sculptural and thematic elements of the series. The setting is Japan, and the various activities that are featured in the film include a kind a kind of traditional Japanese parade dance, pearl diving, sculptural assembly, whale hunting and processing, and Japanese tea ceremony, among others. Thematically uniting these disparate elements is a mysterious symbol that is the center of the film, which looks like a large, oblong flattened pill (like an oval) bisected, or obstructed by a more rectangular shape (like a cross). After the shape is constructed (which it is a couple of times in the film, and in the largest example as a sculpture out of petroleum jelly on the deck of a whaling vessel), the middle section is altered and/or removed, destroying an already ambiguous unity, and making three shapes from what was one and looked like two. Barney cross-cuts incessantly between activities like the sculpture construction and the pearl diving, almost varying between two actions. Mostly these parallels are between a formal activity and the “narrative”, which follows two “guests from the Occident,” played by Barney and Björk, who are picked up from the shore and taken to a whaling boat. There they are ceremoniously shaved, bathed, groomed, dressed, served tea, and eventually united together in an entirely unexpected way. Meanwhile (and Barney’s cutting is the very definition of Griffithian “meanwhile”), the deck sculpture of jelly gradually hardens and is bisected. A sister whaling ship “catches” a rocky and organic looking concrete shaft, which is used to fill the bisected gap of the sculpture. Cut and taken out of its mold, the sculpture melts and collapses, and from the skeletal appearance of the plucked bisection and its combination with the crumbling shaft, remains reminiscent of a whale carcass is created.

The only real dialog of the film is the story of the ship, as told by the tea host (Oshima Sosui), who passes along the Japanese concept of mono no aware, or the sorrowful acceptance of the transience of life. This issue of transience is key to Barney’s creative and surprisingly easily digestible symbology in the film, which focuses on the ultimate destruction of something—as symbolized in the restraint of the cross in the oval being removed—such as the end of the sculpture or a whale, for it to fully become itself. This theme is further explored by the film in beautiful imagistic contrasts between mechanical forces and organic ones. The white, industrial superstructure of the ships, slicing through the ocean, and on-shore factories spewing undulating flames continue this thought. Perhaps most important of all is the idea of ritual or ceremony, and attached to that, formal production. These human rituals often include and coincide with the organic nature, such as the Occidental couple’s dressings in formal, traditional Japanese clothing, but ones made exclusively of animal skins, bones, and furs. Some rituals, such as the boat crews’ quasi-reenacting of a whale hunt and capture, are job-like and utilitarian. Others, such as the tea ceremony, are ceremonial and self-serving. Somewhere in between is the construction of the jelly shape, which is being made on-screen just like the whale is being harpooned on-screen, the oyster’s found, Barney shaved, Björk dressed, etc. This highlights the very nature of the film, and of the line it and Barney tread between being “a film” (whatever that may mean) and “art” (meaning non-cinematic art), since in many ways Drawing Restraint 9 is about the making of, and photo-documenting of, objects and elements of the art series. But because the film details its own production, and the series is, at least in part, about the production process, this thematic mobius strip, however often unsatisfying in the occasional flatness of the recording camerawork or the awkwardness of the proto-narrative editing, is intrinsic to the movie’s interests, and fascinating in its correlations. Just as the tension created between the line between the idea of observing traditional Japanese activities and those directed by Barney likewise confuses the nature of formal structures and nature, so does the idea of Drawing Restraint 9 being a formally orchestrated and discreet film and simply a documenting of an installation process.

Outside of grand concepts, the film includes many other pleasures, and not just its visual esoteria, made surprisingly narrative, tense, and propulsive through Barney’s cross-cutting, which can swing from hackneyed and ignorant in one moment to evoking a kind of purity of simplistic of correlation in the next, reminiscent of its development ages ago in silent cinema. That the images on screen are beautiful is almost a given, but a big surprise is the soundtrack by Björk (with Valegeir Sigurðsson), which fails as a standalone album and employs many of the experimental techniques of the artist’s previous album, Medulla (2004), which sought to use the human voice for instrumental purposes. Put to images, the score alights which an exquisite and deeply atmospheric strangeness, and helps to push some of Barney’s more ungainly moments into cinematic territory, unifying both with contrapunctal techniques and unexpected multi-media echoes. It can range from taking the breathing of the pearl divers and chopping it up into a sound collage to accompany underwater images to a very un- Björkian brass piece, which sounds like an ascetic meeting point between Bernard Herrmann and John Barry, and when set to the fake whale hunt makes Drawing Restraint 9 feel momentarily like an suspense thriller. Other sounds are more elusive, like an untranslated Noh performance and an out of place singing of a letter to General MacCarthy, but a particular highlight is during the climactic sequence where Barney and Björk seemed to “consummate” their “marriage” (quotes there because neither of those things literally happen). The piece is called “Storm”, and begins with Björk’s cries overlapping into themselves, with static haze and reverb sounding in the background like a crashing sea/storm-scape, back beaten by an ominous throbbing, cracks of lightening and Björk’s more and more haunting wails. Taken alone, the track is a masterwork, but crashing against a sudden, shocking, and gruesomely literal embodiment of the destruction/creation of the gooey sculpture, and likewise the death of the metaphoric whale, the experience is unforgettable. The film itself—contemplative, expansive, lovely to look at, challenging to listen to—may lack the visceral impact of that final sequence, but the movie is no less unforgettable, especially because, for so-called avante-garde or experimental cinema, this movie is as easy to watch as it is challenging to think about.