Two men. Friends? Enemies? Lovers? Brothers? One is nothing, success or failure depends on two.
Dmitriy Shibanov
as Инь
Alexey Shuvalov
as Янь
Begotten is the creation myth brought to life, the story of no less than the violent death of God and the (re)birth of nature on a barren earth.
We are first presented a cobweb castle, filled with the haunting doubts of the young protagonist. Spirits appear on the screen and are heard on the soundtrack. Gradually a female guide emerges and escorts the young man into an antechamber to another (and possibly higher) world.
CREMASTER 2 is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1.
CREMASTER 3 is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect...
CREMASTER 4 adheres most closely to the project's biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system's onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion - three identical armored legs revolving around a central axis. Set on the Isle of Man, the film absorbs the island's folklore...
Hoping to find a sense of connection to her late mother, Gorgeous takes a trip with her friends to visit her aunt's ancestral house in the countryside. The girls soon discover that there is more to the old house than meets the eye.
A woman returning home falls asleep and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and complete mismatching of the objective view of time and space, her dark inner desires play out on-screen.
In this fragile yet frightening poetic fantasy set against a dark industrial landscape, a woman sits knitting on the porch of her home when a man appears and takes the knitting from her.
Hiding inside&out, writhing about, taken out&in.
An experimental film shot on distressed 16mm celluloid that reveals various men on the beach or in swimming pools, in various states of lounging in the lazy California sun.
When Jay and Silent Bob learn that their comic-book alter egos, Bluntman and Chronic, have been sold to Hollywood as part of a big-screen movie that leaves them out of any royalties, the pair travel to Tinseltown to sabotage the production.
A sexual reverie unfolds over the course of one ethereal night. Characters wander through an erotic maze of love and lust, blurring the lines between wet dream and lucid nightmare as a macabre, erotic stage performance sends a ripple of lustful desires through its audience and performers.
The world shifts subtly while silent watchers already understand.
A story of broken humanity following the invasion of a technologically superior alien species. Bleak, harrowing, and unrelenting, the humans must find enough courage to go on fighting.
A forgotten faceless celebrity ascends into heaven along the path of self-discovery and through a land of faded memory.
Return to 'burn' only to find out you're already in that urn.
(Some of us) Still run down the same [mental&emotional] streets we revered/reproached/replaced as children.
The pantomime of two characters exchanging roles is accompanied by a three-layered phonogram, where sophisticated narrative text is interrupted by slightly accelerated excerpt from Brezhnev’s speeches, as well as by fragments of statements of the mentally ill person with the schizophasia symptom.