tedg As with reading all comments, you will find it useful to know where the writer is placed. I have watched the first "Cremaster" and Barney's entry in the "Destricted" compilation. That latter piece was a failure in my mind. There's not much overlap between the sculptural and the cinematic anyway. One is more on the noun side, the other on the verb side: contextual, environmental. I admire that he tried to find that commonality in the erotic, but the result is rather sophomoric in all but the initial choices.This isn't wonderful either. I hold hope for the later "Cremaster" experiences, that there will be some valuable conversation between us. This is a wholly different thing altogether. This man has found his love, and has created a valentine. Its a conversation, an intercourse between the two of them. The value we are expected to get is in witnessing rather than participating.The forms he has chosen are all Japanese because they have developed an observational distance with the ordinary things of their life we do not have.The basic urge here is the melding of the two lives: Bjarney, but with careful, artificial constraints. We have the merging of the tea ceremony with the whaling ritual; the reversal of rendering blubber to whaleoil to the coagulation of pseudoblubber from pseudowhaleoil.We have the melding of humans with whales, ambergris with pearls, constructing whale icons with consumption...And of course the conflating of Barney's sculptural objects with Japanese ritualistic ones. I am not well enough versed in details of Japanese esoterica to know where one starts and the other stops, but I suppose in his view it is perfectly balanced, one "restraining" the other; one "drawing" the other, each drawing restraints on another level: tea to whale and so on.The most engaging sequence is at the beginning: three phenomenal episodes: one the wrapping of two packages, bodies; a second the procession of the whale oil returned and ritual construction thereupon; and finally a dive into the water seeking marine truth, revealing a hot blade (seen later as the humans transform into whales).Its not for us, they made this. Its a conversation of love and commitment between the two. We've only crew members.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

aaron-375 WARNING!!! SPOILERS THRUOUGHT!!!After having seen bits and pieces of Mathew Barney's Cremaster cycle, one expects more of the same. But then he offers up Drawing Restraint 9, and I came away, well, blown away. Cremaster was such a convoluted, mythological universe, that I tend to find it unlikely that anyone could produce a body of work that is equally accomplished, thought out, and sprawling. Watching the opening scene of Drawing Restraint, I think of Chris Marker's filmic essay, Sans Soleil. Mostly because of the reference to Japan's Holiday, Coming of Age Day. The dancing seems to be lifted right out of Marker's film. The pacing of both films is actually pretty similar, as is the content. As Marker chose seemingly disparate images and concepts to illustrate a larger commonality in his films, Barney conflates his ideas about artistic restraint with a fantasy about whaling.An extraordinary chain of events occurs in this film. A convergence of mythic proportions, in true Mathew Barney style. A whaling moratorium is lifted in Japan. Bjork and Barney's "occidental guest" characters arrive, inexplicably, by prearranged fishing boat trips in the middle of a Japanese ocean on a whaling ship. The combination of a violent storm, loosely Japanese and heavily stylized costuming, a large petroleum jelly sculpture, a riveting and very aquatic tea ceremony, some bizarre dismemberment, and a giant raw ambergris log, culminate in a human-to-whale transubstantiation for these occidental guests. The pacing of the film is generally slow for its first two thirds, with beautiful imagery of a twenty year old whaling vessel seductively competing against this restrained pace. Then the storm comes, the petroleum begins to consume the entire ship, and there is no more restraint. At its core, this is what the film is about. Barney's obsession with restraint, and his fearful desire to let it go. The Coming of Age Day dance speaks about evolution, from childhood to adulthood. This evolution is echoed throughout the film. The first song, composed by Bjork and Barney, speaks of a "million year old fossil", which is then lovingly wrapped, and sent as a thank you for lifting the whaling moratorium (again, restraints are released, allowing for a thriving economy and plenty of food in a previously depressed community, ethical issues of whaling notwithstanding). The petroleum and steel sculpture, The Field, goes through a constant evolution, from liquid petroleum, to something a little more solid, changing shape, having a spinal cord like object removed from it, briefly housing the ambergris log, then utterly falling apart and being melted down into liquid again. All of this preparing, changing, waiting, is the restraint part of this equation. Then something, in this case ambergris and a storm, catalyzes a strange metamorphosis, and Bjork and Barney turn into whales. Barney must have undergone a similar process with this work, this ninth part of the Drawing Restraint whole being the product of that internal metamorphosis I am imagining for Barney. In all its grandiosity, all of Barney's timid pomp, its actually a very honest expression of fear. Fear of release, accomplishment, potential energy, and the unknown.

xglimmershinex I thought it would at least be aesthetically beautiful. It was slow, pretentious, and boring. I almost fell asleep. There are some decent songs, but there is this one song at the end which is just some guy yelling out "Yaowwww!" while someone taps randomly on a wooden object. That being said, there are some pretty songs, but it's not worth seeing hte movie over. Go on itunes (they have the album), preview it, and choose the good ones. Half the movie is some guy making tea. Well, that's a slight exaggeration. But you'll see what I mean if you see it. That being said: DON'T SEE IT!

fred-711 Last night I went to the movies; saw Drawing Restraint 9, a new film by Matthew Barney and featuring Bjork. I don't go to a lot of movies, but when I left this one I was convinced that I had not gone to a movie at all, but participated in an ancient magical rite having nothing to so with modern movie making.While definitely not a Hollywood feature, it was nevertheless described in the usual hyperbole put out by the theatrical machine conglomerates: "Mesmerizing Viewing, Amazingly Beautiful, Startling Wit and Invention." Of course it was all of the above, but what I saw and experienced in the movie theater was something more than that; something else altogether, the telling without words and reconstruction of an ancient primeval theater that can only be entered by instinct and non-human intelligence.Most of the action takes place aboard ship. On board a Japanese whaling vessel two occidental guests (Barney and Bjork) are invited aboard to share in a formal tea ceremony with the captain. First they are dressed in elaborate wedding clothes inspired by Shinto marriage rites, because after the ceremony they will emerge themselves in a kiss that not only unites the two in a limited matrimony, but also reunites them with the greater sea.I'm not even sure if this was a movie; perhaps it was an actual documentary constructed around the performance of some long forgotten ancient religious ritual, being remembered just now with the help of modern awareness that media affords, like the telescope aided Galileo in redefining the heavens. Yet I do not think the hundreds of "extras" were privy to any of this.And I should make it clear that the extras weren't really extras at all -- they were the actual crew members who live aboard ship. What Barney and Bjork have done, in my estimation, was commandeered the ship and held the captain and crew hostage -- with their permission of course, while pretending to star in a movie -- and then initiated the ancient rites recently remembered by the Icelandic Bjork.But of course the millions of dollars that this all must have cost would've produced one hell of a Hollywood blockbuster! Yet for Bjork and Barney it is an extremely limited engagement that will disappear within a week of its showing. For them the rewards will have been recognized instantly, not in box office dollars but in a newer awareness that an old universe continually demands of its inhabitants.The soundtrack is made of songs, chants and primeval sounds dispersed throughout the movie, which on another level act as incantations spoken directly to Nature, to reverse the direction of Art, specifically the Art of the Whaling Ship. This is hinted at when Bjork and Barney go through an amazing transformation at the close of the film, transforming themselves into whales, complete with blowholes, and return to the sea from which we were all plucked in our infancy.Further indication that this "movie" is really a magical rite in which we are all invited to take part is the captain's short telling of the history of the ship, how it suffered a slight scar at sea (being rammed by another ship), a scar which is now etched on the memory of the crew. "But there is a much older story within the deeper scar." The captain and his occidental guests tell that story to us, through the traditional Japanese tea ceremony wherein they drink of a mixture infused from of the "magnificent ambergris that was once passed through the whale" and the subsequent marriage vows by which the guests cut away superfluous limbs and prepare themselves for their voyage back to the sea, where ceremony once again takes on the fluidity of life.There are additional insights from Bjork's sparsely sung sound track. Utilizing the essential sounds from the ocean and the life in, around, and aboard the ship, she whispers in places the ancient formula of creation: From the moment of commitment, Nature conspires to help us. It is the old Christian aphorism, "All things are provided when we first seek the Kingdom of Heaven." Or Hell, if you prefer.In truth I believe this movie was conceived as ritual, performed by devout and honest people who were not acting (only accentuating and theatricalizing their normal activities) but ultimately redirecting the energies of nature towards the ending of a cruel and unusual punishment still being practiced on one of the great and magnificent life forms that welcomed us aboard in the first place.Possibly tedious at some points, I thought it was equally wonderful that Bjork and Matthew and the Captain and crew had so much leisure to be able to tell the story, to act in this way, to live for weeks or months on the ship and its legacy. But then, I'm a full time artist who has no idea what time it is.What was happening on the screen was only a key meant to unlock what has always been happening within us, within the deeper scar from which we all are naturally and continually emerging our being.Warning: Don't go see this movie with an audience who expected to go see a movie. Buy the DVD instead and follow the instructions, safely inside the privacy of your own home.