A production still from ‘Cremaster 2’. Photo credit: Michael James O’Brien.

The art of Matthew Barney tends to be divisive within the art world, so when he began making forays into cinema, it was bound to rouse arguments with an entirely new audience. His series of Cremaster films is a unique collection of movies, in that they seem at home in both art galleries and movie theaters. These are high-minded art pieces, yet they use recognizable building blocks of narrative filmmaking that make them more accessible than the abstract works that usually come to mind when one thinks of experimental film. Despite his high-art pedigree, Barney’s films owe as much, if not more, to commercial filmmakers like Kubrick, Lynch, and Cronenberg than to avant-garde figures like Brakhage or Deren.

Unlike commercial films, though, Barney has always been resolute that this collection will never appear on DVD. The result has been that after an initial cinematic release (the cycle played in D.C. in 2003 at the old Visions theater on Florida Avenue), screenings have been scattered, some in museums and gallery spaces, others in art house cinemas. This week, though, all of the films come back to D.C. at E Street Cinema, along with a sixth film, De Lama Lamina, that Barney made after the eight-year journey of making the Cremaster movies was complete.

As is often the case, the screenings are organized to pair up the shorter films in the series, leaving the epically-scoped, three-hour third installment to screen on its own. While the films were made out of order, the groupings of the screenings do allow you to see them in numerical order, with one program featuring 1 and 2, another with just 3, and then the last with 4 and 5, plus the one non-Cremaster title. This allows the viewer to see them in the order that Barney intends, which is meant to represent the progression of the films’ symbolic theme: the position of human reproductive organs while undergoing sexual differentiation during embryonic development. The first film is supposed to represent those organs at their highest, most “ascended” point, and the last at their “descended” end; the title of the movies refer to a muscle in the male anatomy that is responsible for raising and lowering the testes in response to temperature.