Festival launches 'eccentric' Bjork film

Bjork’s latest project was launched at the Venice Film Festival today and it is typically eccentric – a film which sees humans turn into whales.

Bjork’s conceptual artist boyfriend Matthew Barney created the film, while the Icelandic-born singer stars with him in it, and has composed the soundtrack.

Drawing Restraint 9 was shot in Nagasaki Bay on board the Japanese ship Nisshin Maru, the mother ship of the Japanese whaling fleet.

Bjork and Barney play two visitors on the ship, who the audience first see on board, groomed, bathed and dressed in mammal fur costumes.

They take part in a tea ceremony before blowing through blowhole-like orifices on the back of their necks, and cutting away at each other’s feet and thighs with knives.

Then their bodies turn into whales, apparently suggesting rebirth.

The film’s “core idea” is described as “the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity”.

Barney is best known for The Cremaster Cycle, a sequence of five films, which were the subject of a recent Guggenheim retrospective.

Bjork drew on everything from the movie Jaws to the atom bomb to compose the typically offbeat soundtrack.

Asked about working together today, Bjork, wearing an apricot-coloured dress, said: “I guess when we first met we decided not to work together.

“Look at us now. It came to a point five years later when it was almost easier to work together than not work together.

“We were watching all the same things... we had grown subconsciously.

“We planted seeds for five years without having anything in mind...then we started to do this it was harvest time...they were popping out.”

Her partner added: “It was something that both of us could sink our teeth into. It felt natural.”

Bjork said: “I had no input into the visuals....If there’s any influence it’s definitely not conscious.

“Obviously it’s different when I write my music first, then I visually know it is an underwater song that’s lonely, or a white song or one with hearts.

“Matthew created the script and the film’s universe and I made the music to fit into this universe.” She added: “I didn’t watch movies as a child, we didn’t have a TV. Maybe in the last five years I’ve been going a bit crazy with video rentals.

“It’s very exciting to be introduced to some movies by Matthew about objects like architecture...but I’m more of a typical woman, I like feelings.” Bjork previously composed the soundtrack for Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, in which she also starred – von Trier claimed she tried to eat her dress during filming.

Born in Iceland, Bjork spent years living in London until press attention and an obsessive fan, who sent an acid bomb to her house and then videotaped his own suicide saying it was to be with her in the afterlife, drove her out.

One section of her new music is inspired by the text of a letter from a Japanese man to General MacArthur thanking him for lifting the US moratorium on whaling off the nation’s coasts.

Asked about working together in the future, Bjork’s boyfriend was confident it would happen saying: “I think there’s certainly no reason why we wouldn’t do it again”.

But Bjork was less certain, saying: “It’s not the right time to say whether we will work together again, maybe, maybe not.”

Meanwhile Barney is now working on more art – jumping up and down on a trampoline to make marks on the ceiling.