{Drawing Restraint 9}
Björk and boyfriend Mathew Barney produce (and star) in this artsy film that is steeped in Japanese seafaring lore and Japanese ritual, in fact a large portion of the film depicts the two making preparations for a traditional Shinto wedding ceremony. At face value, the film is visual poetry, but dig deeper and you'll find metaphors hinting that life is a series of passages in a cycle of creation and destruction. The ship itself is said to be a metaphor for a whale, or Japan, or both. I'm not really sure, but the whale makes sense to me, and would explain some of the Moby Dick comparisons I've read about.
This is the official plot summary: The core idea of Drawing Restraint 9 is the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity, a theme it symbolically tracks through the construction and transformation of a vast sculpture of liquid Vaseline, called “The Field”, which is molded, poured, bisected and reformed on the deck of the ship over the course of the film.
The film is currently opening in select theaters and will only play for a limited time (only one week in my neck of the woods) and will not be released on DVD, so if your interested you'd better jump on it if the film screens near your town.
View the trailer.
The film is directed by Mathew Barney, the soundtrack is composed by Björk and represents the first creative collaboration of two...I'm sure I'm not the only one who's thinking John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Stream samples from the Drawing Restraint 9 Soundtrack here...just scroll down.
