May 10, 2002 AT THE MOVIES (excerpt) Cremaster Is a Wrap by Dave Kehr Matthew Barney has become a filmmaker in spite of himself. A celebrated sculptor and performance artist, Mr. Barney has just completed his "Cremaster" series, five videos (transferred to film) that draw on a wide range of personal associations and cultural allusions to create an epic cycle of ascent and descent, birth and death, creation and destruction. "Cremaster 3," the most recently completed (the cycle was filmed out of order), can be seen at Film Forum in the South Village beginning Wednesday while the entire "Cremaster" series, including its associated sculptures and photographs, will begin a tour of European museums on June 6 in Germany, ending up back in New York at the Guggenheim next Feburary. "It's grown out of documenting real-time performance," the boyish, soft-spoken Mr. Barney explained as sculptures were moving out of his downtown studio on their way to Cologne. "That's how I started: creating these situations where a performance would happen around a network of objects, and a video camera was there basically just to document it. Slowly, I started having an interest in editing those documents, and the editing process got more and more exciting to me, to the point where it started becoming about storytelling." The cycle draws on historical figures (Houdini, Gary Gilmore), playful sexual imagery, creatures out of Celtic myth (fauns and satyrs, often played by Mr. Barney himself) and arcane systems of belief (Freemasonry in "Cremaster 3"). In the new work Mr. Barney appears as "The Entered Apprentice," a young mason working his way up through the elevator shafts of the Chrysler Building, committing acts of sabotage as he goes along; at the summit is the chamber of the Great Architect, played, appropriately, by Richard Serra. This is not material that lends itself to a traditional screenplay, and Mr. Barney proceeds otherwise. "It grows out of drawing, I would say, but not storyboard drawing," he said. "There's a slightly abstract storyboard that's done scene by scene, but within a scene shots aren't generally drawn. But what needs to happen before we can actually go to the set and work is that that abstract storyboard needs to be translated into words rather than a typical drawn storyboard. It leaves a very abstract space on the wall where it usually lives, and rather than going into a series of camera frame, drawn references, it goes into a written shot list. It puts me in a place as a director to be quite spontaneous with camera setups." Now that the five films are complete, where will Mr. Barney direct his energy? "There's a year now of bringing the sculpture together with the moving image," he said, "and I guess until that happens, we haven't really finished the job."