Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler Talk River of Fundament on Pitchfork.tv

In the latest installment of Pitchfork.tv‘s interview series, visual artist Matthew Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler discuss their film River of Fundament.

River of Fundament is an operatic film loosely based on the 1983 Norman Mailer novel, Ancient Evenings. The film’s Egyptian protagonist seeks reincarnation multiple times in the hope of achieving immortality, and the film traces this process of reincarnation (which in Egyptian mythology happens in seven stages) while borrowing its structure from Mailer’s text.

“The beginnings of River of Fundament were to do with a kind of dissatisfaction that I was feeling with my last film-based project,” Barney says. “I’d come to the end of the experiment with regard to making film in that way, and around that time Jonathan Bepler and I had talked about the possibility of making something in a live situation, and that appealed to me more and more.” He goes on to discuss their collaboration, the creative process, and the integration of physical and sonic elements within the film.

“I wanted it to have a bit of an early music sound,” Bepler said of factory-made instruments used for one part of the film. “[I wanted] for it to have a fragile, unsuccessful sound, maybe something in between this ideal of industry and the failure of it at the same time.”

River of Fundament opens at IFC Center on Friday.

 

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