Redoubt (2018)

 

Director: Matthew Barney

Screenplay: Matthew Barney

Cast: Matthew Barney as the Engraver; Eleanor Bauer as the Calling Virgin; K.J. Holmes as the Electroplater; Laura Stokes as the Tracking Virgin; Anette Wachter as Diana; Sandra Lamouche Yellowhorn as the Hoop Dancer

An Abstract List Candidate

 

We begin this review with the fact that I can even cover the following. The legend of Matthew Barney, artist/filmmaker, comes with the caveat that unless seen in a grey market form or through special screenings, his cinematic work since he started as an artist have been difficult to see. Famous for the Cremaster Cycle, five pieces filmed out of order from 1994 to 2003, the series was only possible to see in theatrical screenings. Cremaster 3 (2003), the magnum opus, had a segment within it released commercially on DVD, but the series was only possible to legally own through limited edition DVDs in specially created cases¹.

My university, in the City of Lincoln, had the commercially released DVD, released by Palm Pictures, and its content has been etched in my mind. Set at the Guggenheim Museum, the segment released on DVD was entitled "The Order", following Barney's own character of "the Entered Apprentice" scaling the inside and overcoming a series of obstacles. From rival mosh pits of duelling hardcore bands - Agnostic Front and Murphy’s Law - to Paralympics athlete Aimee Mullins as a half-cheetah/half woman, that one sequence by itself shows the very unconventional and extravagant nature of Barney's work. If you even see images of Barney's work, whether he is under significant amounts of prosthetics or deliberately forcing obstacles on himself in craft work, part of his "Drawing Restraint" pieces, where athleticism and physical barriers were put on himself during creation, the work from the Cremaster era are very unconventional and aesthetically extravagant even compared to installation artists, completely touching upon the surreal even.

Again, these films are not easily available - including Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) which he collaborated with his then-wife Bjork, the legendary Icelandic musician, and the five plus hour Norman Mailer adaptation/opus Rivers of Fundament (2014)² - but Redoubt, his 2018, had been made available through theatrical screenings through Grasshopper Films, and in a rare moment in Spring 2021 even available to stream on MUBI³, a rare case of his work actually being available to see beyond a gallery setting. This however is a more restrained piece - not of sights like a death metal drumming playing whilst being entirely covered in real bees head-to-toe - and notably, Barney is now an older artist dressing down in his character of an artist who crafts electroplated copper etchings in the middle of the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, stepping back in his own work as one of a small ensemble. The long prologue even for this review is necessary before you even have to try to unpack what Redoubt means and signifies, as it has so much to unpack.

Even the title is distinct as, playing to a mythological tone, "Redoubt" is likely a reference to "American Redoubt", a political migration movement first proposed in 2011 by survivalist novelist and blogger James Wesley Rawles which designates certain areas in the north-western United States (including Idaho) as a safe haven for conservative, libertarian-leaning Christians and Jews⁴. Boise, Idaho was also where Californian born Barney was raised, making the location in Sawtooth Mountains a step into his own life, contrasted with political subtexts and history being touched upon in the content symbolically. That being, effectively, a retelling of the myth of Diana and Actaeon, found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Actaeon is a young hunter who accidentally stumbles upon the goddess of the hunt in the midst of bathing, promptly turned into a deer by her as a consequence and eventually ripped to shreds by his own hounds as a result. 

Wolves, found in the film, evoke a huge political issue that came in the 1980s in Idaho of introducing them back into the wild which divided conservationists against vocal figures like hunters and ranchers, something the director-writer has explicitly evoked⁵. Set within this, and a more modern political subject of the American Redoubt, you have Actaeon as depicted as Barney, an older man who living in a camper with a figure (dance artist/singer/poet/actor K.J. Holmes) who helps create between them finished electroplated etchings, a fascinatingly (and for me, weirdly archaic and almost alchemical) process of metal plating by way of chemical baths where Barney's copper etched work done in the snow covered landscapes are dropped into and the electrocuted for a final finish. Playing Diana, following by two Virgins called the Calling Virgin and the Tracking Virgin, the "30 Cal Girl" Anette Wachter, an NRA advocate and international long-range shooting champion would have been able to complete all the rifle shots in this film entirely with her own skills. Her two follows are played by Eleanor Bauer and Laura Stokes, the former Bauer a dance choreographer who worked on the dance sequences in the film too⁵.

Questions can be raised, entirely due the more intense climate that the world was in during the later 2010s with more tightly drawn and antagonistic political lines, about a film like this which is not engaging with a moral message or a political opinion, but interpretation through an dialogue-less modern myth, set entirely in the Sawtooth Mountains over multiple "hunts", chapters divided between each other, as Barney's "Engraver" and Wachter's Diana will eventually pass crosshairs. In truth, this is entirely for each individual viewer to consider - likely a cop-out in opinion, but it is very clear that the film is a symbolic work as much about the art within itself, sketched within its precise and simple narrative, than tackling the politics. It is better Redoubt never becomes overtly political and is instead a dreamscape of his history with Idaho and tensions within it clashing. Matthew Barney can be political or least reference the real world when he can, such as collaborating with others on a "Remains Board", on the exterior of his studio building in Long Island City, a large seven-segment digital clock counting down the days and hours remaining in the U.S. president Donald Trump's first (and only) term⁶.

How the film decides to present itself works. Redoubt, benefitting from a sense of narrative and a clear narrative, is distinct. The atmosphere of the film, entirely dialogueless, is striking, in which slowly burning to their conflict, the natural landscape of Sawtooth Mountains is lived in, with the natural wildlife brought in, even to the point (as a disclaimer states in the end credits) the production worked around simulating scenes of animals being shot and targeted with rifles without harming them for vividness. The art within this is as much of the film too, where the key collaborators onscreen bring their own craft fully through. Wachter with her real skill in rifle shooting contrasted by Bauer and Stokes as her assistants, between them figures almost more of the landscape in their contrasting dancing movements against the preciseness of Wachter's hunter Diana.  

The resulting emphasis is hypnotic, one which requires a great deal to digest. The film is also aware too, before anyone asks, this is a history of white Americana it is evoking, as one of the only other actors within the film is Sandra Lamouche Yellowhorn. A dancer who is crossed paths with in a town hall practicing an elaborate and beautiful dance with hoops by herself, she is the one non-Caucasian figure whose existence is more than this, enticed by her dances in her own space listening to music in headphones, but a poignant reminder (as with the title) Barney is evoking a specific part of his culture which is not the same as everyone else's. It is poignant, as well, he is the only male within the cast, still a prominent figure who works in his private world, etching the landscape and even a cougar up in a tree, even killing one of the virgins during their first crossings. Yet, with Diana and her assistances effectively immortal, he is merely one figure, and even shooting one of the hunter's assistants does not mean she will stay dead.

The pair of Eleanor Bauer and Laura Stokes in particular have the most striking screen presence, first introduced high in two trees paralleling each other on a hammock they have to ascend down from in spins on rope, their interactions with each other whether in a spring pool or casually as two opposites who dance or cavort around each other in the background whilst Diana the huntress is collected, precise and silent. K.J. Holmes as the figure with Barney's Engraver is restrained in contrast, the figure who completes the electroplating with the elaborate system she has set up. When the film leads to a chaotic end, actual wolves descending on the inside of the camper and tear everything to shreds, she is calm, dancing outside at night whilst what can be only described as an unnatural solar eclipse captured for the film, one transpiring that sinks the moment into twilight related frenzy.

All of this is built naturally too, and honestly, with a lot greater power than most traditional storytelling and without any dialogue. Redoubt is effectively "avant-garde", but its construct and form is easy to understand and compelling as a tale, the myth it is telling told simply within itself, and only the presentation and its tangents emphasising additional pieces. Redoubt undeniably is part of its own larger project, as the film exists as much with Barney's own craft and sculptures which toured with Redoubt itself, but again, it is a tragedy that his work exists as a rare phoenix in terms of being able to experience. More so when with this, a subdued and less maximalist extravagance of his earlier work I have seen snippets of, is  a film of a greater artistic power and clearness than if you attempted to make this film as a drama with dialogue and "making sense" of.

Progress in film making technology has helped him, as he does indeed with his cinematographer Peter Strietmann embrace the drone camera, but the landscape of Sawtooth Mountains and its natural occupants are utterly striking themselves, as vivid as his artificially created worlds used beforehand. Some will be difficult content for some viewers, evoking the hunting and shooting of animals with the potential distress involved, but is also has the striking images of a cougar calmly in a tree among others, the beauty of the world in this snow covered wilderness as much embraced. To my own surprise, feeling close to them as an animal, I realise magpies are carnivores in terms of being at least scavengers as, whilst the film does explicitly state its carefulness with the animals used, dead carcasses are used or were located a filmed, and there is a scene where Barney himself is clearly skinning a dead animal, part of the final conclusion of his character.

Certainly, in contrast to what I have seen, including his previous fixations of petroleum jelly and very human made industrial materials, Redoubt is a striking contrast, a film which is entirely set in the wilderness.  If anything is artificial, it is an entirely different aesthetic for him, where one very distinct form of craft is even contrasted in itself when bullets are shot at the copper plates and leave their permanent marks of impact on the easy-to-scar surfaces. If politics has to play a part in interpretation, it would frustrate some that Barney is staying from neither side, but he is as if chronicling the sense of tensions of this landscape, one in Sawtooth Mountains isolated from humanity yet in this is a place where tensions mount. As its own work, constructed, it is a thing to bask in and find so much in apparently very simple material, something exceptional as a result.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None); Low

 

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1) Such as the following example shown HERE.

2) The one exception that was commercially available was his collaboration to Destricted (2006), a British-American anthology of conceptual artists and filmmakers tackling pornography, which was divisive when it first came out and has been forgotten about. (Alongside the fact that the British and American releases are very different, with segments unique to either for DVD). Barney's - which is in both versions alongside artist Marina Abramović, filmmaker Larry Clark and Demolition Man director Marco Brambilla - is the meeting of the body with industrial machinery. What it is turns out to be, with Barney in full costume, effectively masturbating with the help of an industrial machine he is inside, as bizarre (and with a variety of liquids involved) as you could hope. 

3) I saw the first for the first time, on MUBI, on the 13th May 2021 just to time stamp this. An early birthday gift, as I am born in that month, in fact and the pleasure a few days before said birthday to see a Matthew Barney film was appreciated.

4) To read of in more detail, follow the link HERE.

5) Taken from an Art News article on the film HERE:

"“One of the stronger memories I have of Idaho was the debate that carried on throughout the ’80s about reintroducing wolves into the wild,” Barney said. “On one side you had the voices of people who used the land—hunters, ranchers—and on the other you had voices of conservation. Arguments were fierce. When I was a teenager you would hear about fights breaking out in town hall meetings and people being dragged out of rooms. The wolf subject couldn’t be mentioned in a bar.”"

6) Which can talked about HERE.