Matthew Barney's Redoubt is playing exclusively on MUBI in the UK starting on May 20, 2021. It is also being presented alongside the exhibition "Matthew Barney: Redoubt" at the Hayward Gallery in London.
As much as anything, Redoubt was an opportunity to think more about some of the mythologies I inherited growing up in the West. I wanted to make a portrait of central Idaho that would capture the complexity of that region, both the beautiful and the darker aspects of its landscape and culture. The debate over the reintroduction of the gray wolf into the wilderness of Idaho gave me a narrative structure to explore these themes on a mythic scale.
Central and southern Idaho are geographically isolated by the Rocky Mountains to the northeast, and the high desert to the southwest, and there are strong isolationist tendencies culturally as well. One extremist movement in parts of Idaho, eastern Oregon and Washington, and western Montana and Wyoming calls for a separation from government and urban life and a return to the land and is known as the American Redoubt. A redoubt generally refers to a defensive military fortification, especially an isolated earthwork, but I appreciate the ambiguity in the term, as it also evokes a more abstract form of personal isolation or withdrawal.
When I was a teenager in Idaho, the debate over the reintroduction of wolves into the Idaho wilderness seemed to capture something essential about the state and its political divide, which has been extreme for as long as I can remember. Given the place that wolves occupy in our imagination, the conversation took on a mythological scale, and had a much greater meaning than the sum of the two arguments being voiced.
In Idaho, hunting is intertwined with land management and all the conversations around the environment and the natural world. So as I began to develop the story around a wolf hunt, I was attracted to the character of the goddess Diana, who is both protector of the natural world and a predator; the paradox of her character is that she kills the thing she holds sacred. The myth became a useful tool in translating the Redoubt narrative from a local scale to a more universal one. In the ancient myth of Diana and Actaeon, the male character is out hunting and comes upon Diana and her Virgins—and as he looks upon them, Diana punishes him for his transgression. In Redoubt, when the Engraver sees Diana, he is compelled to draw her image and the landscape around her. I think most artists struggle with this question about the degree to which they possess their subject matter. I wanted to perform the role of the Engraver as a way of not only thinking more about these questions but also exploring them in my drawing.
Most of my films historically do not have dialogue, and Redoubt follows in that tradition. But in this film, I worked more directly with dance, so that choreography becomes a sort of language between the characters. Because so much of hunting is about waiting, listening, and watching in silence, I worked with choreographer Eleanor Bauer to develop a subtlety of movement and a sense of protracted time on screen—a choreography of waiting. During filming, the challenges of performing in the mountainous landscape in the dead of winter started to dominate the discussion. The frigid temperatures and waist-deep snow affected what types of movements could be accomplished under those extreme physical conditions. I thought of the landscape as almost another character in the film, so it made sense to me that the dancers had to react to it, improvise with it. One of the challenges throughout the piece was finding ways of placing the vocabulary of dance into the landscape of the film in a natural way.
As Redoubt is an engagement with the many layers of this region and its landscape, told through the language of dance and movement, I felt it was important to include a form of contemporary Native American dance. Sandra Lamouche, of the Bigstone Cree Nation, had posted some videos online that I saw, and I read about her background as a performer and choreographer of both contemporary and indigenous dance, which Eleanor and I both felt was important. Sandra’s specialty is the hoop dance, a relatively recent powwow form that is danced by members of many different tribes. We were eager to work with her on a choreography that brings the hoop dance into dialogue with some of the other movement-based sequences in the film. Hoop dance has a technical quality that aligns well with some of the other forms at play in the film, such as aerial rope choreography, arborist tree-climbing techniques, and the tactical language that the choreography draws on throughout the story. But it’s also a form that is used narratively, to create images in dance of animals, birds, or hunters—in this way, it both expands and reinforces many of the choreographic themes of Redoubt.
I wanted Redoubt to function within the tradition of the Cosmic Hunt family of myths. In these myths, the hunter or the hunted is killed and then transported into the cosmos as a constellation. The Electroplater is a character who takes the Engraver’s drawings and transforms them, electrochemically, elevating them through her process of abstraction. Her choreography is organized both by gestures of conductivity between the ground and the sky and by reinterpreting the gestures made by other characters throughout the narrative. The Electroplater is a synthesizer of sorts. Toward the end of filming, I had the opportunity to shoot the full solar eclipse in Idaho; the location where we filmed was directly in the path of totality. So I rewrote the final scene around the eclipse—which was very fitting, given that for me, the film was very much about connecting the earth to the sky.
*This introduction is adapted from “An Interview with Matthew Barney,” Yale University Art Gallery Magazine (spring 2019): 16–21.