Matthew Barney, “Cremaster 3”, 2002 (181 min)
With CREMASTER 3, Matthew Barney created the last film in the five-part “CREMASTER cycle”. He began the cycle in 1994, but did not produce the parts chronologically.
Like all the other parts of the cycle, the film manipulates narrative genres, in this case zombie films and the classic gangster movie. The action takes place in New York in the 1930s, in Saragota Springs and on the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. In terms of content, it deals with themes as diverse as the “Irish Mob”, i.e. Irish-American organized crime, Freemasonry and Celtic mythology – symbols of forces that come to bear in Barney’s mythological system.
The film was shot in the Chrysler Building and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, both of which provide a kind of sculptural backdrop for the dramatic narrative. Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967 and lives and works in New York.