Audiovisual material gathered by filmmaker Fox Maxy over a decade, including documentary footage, television clips, and animation—sometimes layered on top of one another—are presented as one collage. Amid this sensory barrage, themes of sexual violence, community, confidence and joy are explored.
This animated short is a play on motion set against a background of multi-hued sky. Spheres of translucent pearl float weightlessly in the unlimited panorama of the sky, grouping, regrouping or colliding like the stylized burst of some atomic chain reaction. The dance is set to the musical cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.
Spheres
1969
5
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 2
1999
6
CREMASTER 3 (2002) 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 3
2002
6
This hand-painted and elaborately step-printed work begins with a flourish of reds and yellows and purples in palpable fruit-like shapes interspersed by darkness, then becomes lit lightning-like by sharp multiply-colored twigs-of shape, all resolving into shapes of decay. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.
Persian Series #1
1999
5
Multiple thrusts and then retractions of oranges, reds, blues, and the flickering, almost black, textural dissolves suggesting an amalgam approaching script. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.
Persian Series #2
1999
5
Dark, fast-paced symmetry in mixed weave of tones moving from oranges & yellows to blue-greens, then retreating (dissolves of zooming away) to both rounded and soft-edged shapes shot with black. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013.
Persian Series #3
1999
5
An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility. More an exercise in style than storytelling, the story follows two detectives trying to uncover the case. Homosexual tension and explosive violence drives the story which delivers some weird and fascinating visuals.
46億年の恋
2006
6
Turquoise and maroon-toned thin lines of paint are interspersed with variously toned circular "watermarks" of blotched paint giving-way to multi-colored brush strokes and finally fulsomely darkened and thickened brush-strokes which then thin to something akin to the beginning.
Prelude 1
1995
5
Interplay of toned rectangular shapes, vertical and horizontal and diagonal lines in juxtaposition with hardened darker shapes which gradually shift tone and lighten until ending on thin blues.
Prelude 2
1995
5
Many white interruptive frames and absolutely straight-edged multi-colored lines amidst "clouds" of color, finally thickened into blobs with lengthy white (clear leader) spacing between them.
Prelude 3
1995
5
Much depth of multi-colored thickened shapes which appear to be superimposed upon each other, semi-transparent in their "weave" with each other which is increasingly interrupted by ragged-edged blobs and smears of color.
Prelude 4
1995
5
This section is very similar to Prelude 4 except that it is composed of extremely thin-lined colors and sharply delineated shapes which are constantly interrupted by "cloud"-like forms.
Prelude 5
1995
5
Interplay of mostly horizontal lines inter-woven with "watermark" forms in a wide variety of tones which gradually tend to dissolve into blues at the end.
Prelude 6
1995
5
The ocean, the trees, the varieties of cityscape and landscape assert themselves as "pictures", but the images are essentially a wash and tangle of nervous feedback, sometimes influenced by the colors of inlet waters, sometimes the wave movements, but more ordinarily by the cellular shifts and shapes of the optic system receiving exterior imagery.
Prelude 7
1996
6
...as removed as possible from any recognition of either exterior scene of interior feedback phenomena. It is, in its ineffability, as close to pure visual music as I can make it, more inspired by The Preludes of Bach or The Preludium of Buxtehude than anything of my surroundings when I was painting.
Prelude 8
1996
5
...again, is "plein-aire abstraction" as defined above (painted in New York City) – with, for example, even a correctly toned green impression of The Statue of Liberty – and, then, impressions of Toronto with its architectural particularities appearing, midst hurrying people – shapes (almost as if photographed at times). This segment is Double-Printed (i. e., two frames for every painted one).
Prelude 9
1996
6
Prelude 10 is a double-printed film with an extreme mixture of darks shot thru with jewel-like bursts of color, and very white bursts of light and fleeting colored forms.
Prelude 10
1996
6
Thick weaves of multicolored lines and dull-colored blobs play off against each other.
Prelude 11
1996
5
A bursting of mostly golden light forms as if heralding sunlight itself in their hurried (single-frame) display.
Prelude 12
1996
6
Singly-printed multi-colored watery "blobs" and "feathery" streaks of painted color, dominated by yellows and reds interweaving in complexity until there's an evolution of hard-edge autumn leaf patterns which dissipate into patterns similar to the beginning of the film.
Prelude 13
1996
5