Synopsis

In 2007, Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler began a new collaborative project inspired by American author Norman Mailer's 1983 novel Ancient Evenings, set in pharaonic Egypt. The project was conceived as a nontraditional opera with a series of one-time-only live acts performed across the American landscape over a five-year period. This opera developed as a film titled River of Fundament, which combines documentation of the three live acts with scenes set in a reconstruction of Norman Mailer's brownstone apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Barney and Bepler reimagine Mailer as his own protagonist who reincarnates three times in three different bodies by magically entering the womb of his wife Hathfertiti. In his attempt at rebirth, Norman must endure the departure of his soul's seven mythological states: the ren or secret name; the sekhem or power; the khu or light; the ba or spirit; the ka or double; the khabit or shadow; and finally the sekhu, or remains. With each incarnation the undead Norman emerges from a river of feces that runs beneath his Brooklyn Heights apartment and enters his own wake

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