![]() And deeper into the movie, when Barney presents an immense iron pour staged in a nighttime Detroit, there is authentic moviemaking magic in the funky sumptuousness of the antiquated industrial architecture, the fleet of workmen like Constructivist robots in their boxy fireproof clothing, and the glittering rivulets and pools of molten metal.īarney is by no means the only artist who started out in the galleries and pretty soon discovered that his appetite for spectacle was better served by the communal rites of the movies. Paul Giamatti, playing Pharaoh Ptah-Nem-Hotep but in modern dress, has the professional’s way of bringing some dramatic sense to impossible mystico-Dadaist situations. And the artist Lawrence Weiner and the columnist Liz Smith are diverting screen presences, at ease before the camera. Stritch is great to watch in her owlish glasses, even if she’s reading some of Mailer’s most bombastic prose. And in the first couple of hours of River of Fundament, dominated by a fictionalized wake held for Mailer in his Brooklyn Heights apartment, the chiaroscuro lighting and quickening pace make it easy to enjoy watching the talented performers, professional and amateur alike, drift through a high-flying literary-artistic celebrity mash-up. When Barney organizes one of his lunatic parades in Los Angeles for River of Fundament, with workingmen and musicians in fancy costumes accompanying an American-made car to its death (or is it reincarnation?), he keeps the camera in motion, so the delirious combination of Egyptomania and Chrysler-mania feels light, almost fairytale-ish. In River of Fundament, his abiding obsessions with ritual, fetish, and movie-star charisma are presented with considerably more fluidity-with a roving camera eye that suggests playfulness, even wit. Barney has grown beyond the self-consciously static visual style of the Cremaster cycle, the set of five films (1994–2002) which have something to do with the reproductive cycle and somehow involve the murderer Gary Gilmore, the magician Harry Houdini, the actress Ursula Andress, and a red-and-gold baroque theater. The first three or four hours of River of Fundament are confidently, elegantly paced. The big news-the amazement-is that Barney holds all this together for as long as he does. ![]() ![]() Are you still with me? If you are, you haven’t yet really fallen under the spell of River of Fundament, which is engineered for bewilderment.Īn American-made car motif is featured prominently in River of Fundament That’s one of the rivers in River of Fundament there’s also the river the runs around Manhattan and the river where the salmon spawn and die in Idaho, a part of the country that holds a special interest for Barney because it’s where another of his hyper-masculine literary heroes, Ernest Hemingway, had a home and committed suicide. And, yes, there is a river of feces, which flows beneath Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights apartment. And in River of Fundament it is Mailer who is reincarnated. ![]() Ancient Evenings was the story of an Egyptian nobleman by the name of Menenhatet I who was reincarnated three times, with each reincarnation involving crossing the river of feces (yes, you heard right). You might imagine that a mythopoetic reimagining of Mailer’s life was enough for one movie, but Barney, whose ego may be even bigger than Mailer’s, has thickened the stew that is River of Fundament with a dirge for American car culture, an anthology of world music, a study of New York literary life, an exploration of America’s withering industrial landscape, a salute to Ernest Hemingway, an opera, a one-woman show by Broadway actress Elaine Stritch, and a documentary about the creation of several of Barney’s art works. Barney is besotted with Mailer and his legend-and with the scatalogical excess that gave Ancient Evenings its cringe-inducing weirdness and will leave moviegoers covering their eyes during certain scenes in River of Fundament. That pathologically self-indulgent exercise in historical fiction, almost universally reviled when first published in 1983, was Mailer in the throes of an Ancient Egyptian fever dream, with gods and mortals enacting the tough-guy author’s obsessions with birth, death, rebirth, sex, and all things anal. Before anything else, the movie is a meditation on Norman Mailer and his novel Ancient Evenings.
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