SYNOPSICS
River of Fundament (2014) is a English,Spanish movie. Matthew Barney has directed this movie. Dave Bald Eagle,Milford Graves,John Buffalo Mailer,Ellen Burstyn are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2014. River of Fundament (2014) is considered one of the best Drama movie in India and around the world.
In 2007, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler began a new collaborative project inspired by American author Norman Mailer's 1983 novel Ancient Evenings, set in pharaonic Egypt. The project was conceived as a nontraditional opera with a series of one-time-only live acts performed across the American landscape. The film River of Fundament combines documentation of these three live acts with scenes set in a reconstruction of Norman Mailer's brownstone apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Barney and Bepler's script reimagines Mailer as his own protagonist who reincarnates three times in three different bodies by magically entering the womb of his wife Hathfertiti. With each incarnation the undead Norman emerges from a river of feces that runs beneath his Brooklyn Heights apartment and enters his own wake. Imagined as a memorial gathering attended by figures in the New York literary world, the wake takes place inside the Mailer apartment as it is ferried down the river. Guests eulogize Mailer and ...
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River of Fundament (2014) Reviews
Avant God Awful
You have to give Matthew Barney some credit for trying! You really do. This is truly "like nothing you've ever seen before". An adaptation of Norman Mailer's novel Ancient Evenings (which I have not read but now want to) The film marries cinema with performance art and avant garde theater. Basically there are sequences of cinematic poetry next to filmed excerpts of various one time performances, which supposedly form one abstracted narrative, but more on that later. ACT I In the first sequence things open cinematically, with rivers of feces, shotguns, grimy sewers, and a general atmosphere of no holds barred f***ed-up symbolic cinema. At this point I'm psyched, as that is exactly what I signed up for: confusion, dread, and beauty. However the camera pans from here into.... Norman Mailer's apartment. And the film turns into one of those works of art that seems content to masturbate endlessly on how smart a certain creator is (Mailer), and how smart the art itself's creator is (Barney & co), and, perhaps most painfully, how smart the bougie intellectual scene of Brooklyn Heights is. And here is where I start contemplating how best to get my own defecations to Matthew Barney. The premise here is that you are sitting in with the hippest, most interesting old artist ***holes (sry Jonas Mekas and Elaine Stritch, love your work!) while they give the coolest, artsiest wake ever to Norman Mailer, where they laugh and cry and reminisce, all while breaking out in avant garde singing at any point they get - think people making somewhat harmonized animal noises together in the most pretentious way possible. I've been to avant garde concerts like this and appreciated them, but when it's happening for an hour straight on a movie screen you can't help think about all the other things they could film instead, like paint drying, or someone vomiting endlessly on a copy of Ancient Evenings, or perhaps just an hour straight of Barney taking a dump, all of which I would've genuinely preferred. There are some brilliant sequences intercut with the "performance piece" of the wake, like more sewage and an okay sequence with cars, but they just further show how flat and bland the performance feels when up on a movie screen. Basically Barney purported to create a work about rivers of s**t, and death, and America, and at the same time expects me to be ecstatic at how great this wake is, and how wonderful it is that Mailer's friends appreciate how life is for the living and how important art is? ART IS NOT ABOUT NICE PEOPLE DOING NICE THINGS! You can't talk about the pain and humanity of existence and then show rich white intellectuals having a good time, hanging out in a classy brownstone, and generally being awesome and "down to earth" and think these two messages will compliment each other. And having a super-convoluted side plot of resurrection and Egyptian gods doesn't change that. Eventually the sequence ends (though sadly not forever), and there's an intermission. I go to the bar and try to forget the last hour. ACT II Act two once again opens in a promising way. I can't say enough about the cinematic portions of this movie! They are beautiful! Go watch the trailer, it's awesome. So we get a cow birthing a man, some sweeping river shots, some Egyptian style golden luxury, and some well composed shots of the Detroit city-scape. Then they get into some more performance art stuff involving the destruction of cars (blah blah blah American car industry as symbol of America's bombast and largess *yawn*) and while it isn't great art, it looks amazing and is a welcome break from Norman Mailer's apartment that is inexplicably still being cut back to. Before too long they end up back at that gorgeous river... and they zoom in on some boats... and there seem to be a lot of people... and they're starting to sing... and GOD DAMMIT ANOTHER HOUR OF ARTSY THEATER STUFF! Thank you for trying Matthew Barney, you really put your all into it, but theatrical performances in a movie really pale in comparison to actual cinema. Even wordless cinema! With nothing happening! And when you put both in the same movie right next to each other it just makes this even more clear. At least in the avant-garde, film is the superior art form!! I would've felt like a d**k saying that before. I would've said that theater isn't for me, or that I haven't experienced great theater. But now, after seeing short bursts of great cinema alongside the endless diarrhea of the long theatrical scenes, I feel confident in just saying it. FILM S**TS ON THEATER ANY DAY OF THE WEEK! Needless to say I did not stay for the third act.
An epic opera of filth, beauty, death, life and rebirth
There's no voice of a narrator telling you, what's going on. Weird scenes with groups of people organizing themselves in a way, that doesn't give any explanation, only hints of remembrance, but there is no self-explanatory sense in how everyone acts. Mesmerizing tribal music, orchestral sounds and opera singers lead the way. Images that don't make sense are repeated and suddenly there is sense. If you can enjoy this film depends highly on your expectations. It isn't supposed to be a classic hollywood blockbuster, nor an edgy independet film. It is a gentle opera of images and sound. Matthew Barney referenced Kubrick in his films before, but this time he is taking it on another level. It is not a tough piece of experimental film, that wants to challenge the viewer. It is an experimental film, that's breaking down to the core of film - suspense, drama and beauty. The mythological happenings surrounding Norman Mailer are telling a deeply emotional and symbolically charged story of life, death and rebirth in it's rawest but strangest way. If you want to know more about the story of the film, you could read the synopsis. But where would be the fun then, in discovering Matthew Barneys' powerful world by yourself? Unfortunatly you won't be able to find this film on a dvd or online, but let's hope that this will change in the future.
Avant Garde Scat Porno Opera with an All-Star Cast
This is a pornographic avant-garde scatological Egyptian-lite opera with an all-star cast, so if that is your cup of filth, you might enjoy it. However it runs six hours long, so even people who want to see the 'Woody Allen' sequence with a star-studded Brooklyn Heights literary cameo crew for a Mailer memorial wake will then have to sit through eternal slow moments of slurping genitalia, penetration, rotting pig flesh, flies and maggots, anal penetration with plumbing pipes, and excrement wrapped in gold leaf. The theater I saw this film in was not full -- and that did not bode well since the director would soon be present for a Q&A! Let me say this: It's time for Matthew Barney to focus on Children's Fairy Stories. I think he could remake 'Into The Woods' or 'Hansel & Gretel' properly. This film just looked like...what's that four-letter word that starts with S and ends with T?