At ARTnews, Andy Battaglia reports that Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler’s River of Fundament is coming back to New York: an eight-hour event at the Masonic Hall on West 23rd Street on November 14. The film’s three acts, which run about five and a half hours together, will be broken up by intermissions so the audience can wander the building, and the screening itself will be in the Grand Lodge of the Free & Accepted Masons of New York, the order’s largest ritual room. The New People’s Cinema Club and the Unsound festival are presenting it together. Unsound screened the film with live music in Kraków last year. The next day Barney and Bepler will be in conversation at Public Records in Brooklyn. It is the film’s first New York showing since it premiered at BAM twelve years ago.
For those who missed it then: River of Fundament is loosely based on Ancient Evenings (1983), the Egyptian novel Mailer spent a decade on and that his readers have been arguing about ever since. Barney turns it into a wake. Mourners gather in a replica of Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights apartment, with a river of sewage running beneath the floor, while Mailer tries to be reborn, as Menenhetet does in the novel, through three bodies, which in the film are three American cars: a 1967 Chrysler Imperial, a 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, and a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria police interceptor. Elaine Stritch, Ellen Burstyn, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Paul Giamatti, Joan La Barbara, and John Buffalo Mailer are in the cast. The collaboration started in Mailer’s lifetime. He played Houdini in Barney’s Cremaster 2 (1999), and the project that became River of Fundament began in 2007, the year he died.
The Masonic Hall fits a film like this. Ancient Evenings is a book about embalming, ritual, and secret knowledge passed down through the dead, and it suits being seen in a lodge more than in a multiplex. (Mailer once tore six pages on embalming out of his wife’s inscribed copy of the novel and lost them.) Readers who steer newcomers away from Ancient Evenings may want to take this chance to see what Barney did with it. Members in New York should plan on a long evening and bring something to eat.