This shot shows a portrait of the Harry Houdini character from the Cremaster cycle by the artist Matthew Barney. He wears a tuxedo with a white bow tie and looks directly into the camera in three-quarter profile.
Filmmuseum Munich

Matthew Barney. CREMASTER 2

In 1999, CREMASTER 2, Matthew Barney’s third film of the monumental, five-part CREMASTER cycle, which was not produced chronologically, was completed; it premiered in Minneapolis that same year and was acquired a short time later by the Sammlung Goetz. The Filmmuseum is presenting this new acquisition in a cooperative event with the Sammlung Goetz.

CREMASTER 2, 1999, 79’

The film CREMASTER 2 tells the life story of the murderer Gary Gilmore, who was executed in Utah in the 1970s for killing a Mormon gas station owner in Orem. Gilmore’s childhood was characterized by abuse and violence. After his arrest, he refused to defend himself and demanded his lawyers seek the death penalty for him. Barney, who gives the story a mythological charge and transports it to the Columbia Icefields in Canada and the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, stages the execution of the convicted murderer as a rodeo.

Introduction: Rainald Schumacher

Further exhibitions

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