Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament to Screen in Eight-Hour Event at New York Masonic Hall

Twelve years after premiering in New York, back then at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler’s epic film River of Fundament will return to the big screen in an eight-hour event at the Masonic Hall of New York, on West 23rd Street in Chelsea.

On November 14, the film’s three acts, which run for nearly five and a half hours in total, will be separated by intermissions to allow the audience “to move throughout the adjoining spaces of the Masonic Hall’s largest ritual meeting space, the Grand Lodge of the Free & Accepted Masons of New York, a congregation founded in 1782,” according to a press release. “Food and libations will be offered, extending the experience beyond the screening itself into a ceremonious gathering in this historic setting.”

River of Fundament expands the story of Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel Ancient Evenings in a decidedly discursive fashion, evoking the spirits of Egyptian gods while navigating realms marked by reincarnation and rebirth. The cast includes the notable actors Paul Giamatti, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ellen Burstyn, Elaine Stritch, and others. Luminaries from various cultural realms also figure in the operatic film, among them Deborah Harry, Jonas Mekas, Joan La Barbara, Milford Graves, Salman Rushdie, Dick Cavett, John Buffalo Mailer, Larry Holmes, Lawrence Weiner, and Barney himself.

The eight-hour event is being co-presented by the New York–based New People’s Cinema Club and Unsound, a music festival that screened River of Fundament with live musical accompaniment in Krakow, Poland, last year. The event will be followed the next day by a conversation with Barney and Bepler, a close collaborator who composed the music for River of Fundament and many of Barney’s other films, at Public Records in Brooklyn, to be moderated by the writer of this article. Tickets for the screening went on sale this morning and are available here.