Here's something truly novel - an art object that features credits for a buffalo wrangler and a bee trainer. Cremaster 2, by American artist Matthew Barney, is very much an object - an elaborately crafted, infinitely strange thing that you watch much as you might walk around a complex sculpture, puzzling out how the parts fit together. But it's also a movie - not a scrappy artist's video but a 79-minute film with special effects, stars and a story, or fragments of one.
Cremaster 2 - actually the fourth in the series - even has a pitch, of sorts. It's about the master escapologist Harry Houdini and Gary Gilmore, who committed two murders in Utah in 1976 and was subsequently executed at his own insistence. One connection is that Gilmore's grandmother, Baby Fay La Foe, claimed to have had a liaison with Houdini. Another is that Houdini is played by Gilmore's biog- rapher Norman Mailer, whose book The Executioner's Song appears to be one of Barney's sources.
The film begins with an ominously swelling organ chord, as the camera pulls out on what first appears to be a landscape, then proves to be a strange horned sculpture made out of small plates of glass or plastic. We cut to an ice floe, then to a meeting between Baby Fay and a couple who plunge their hands into a curious table, one of Barney's idiosyncratically sculpted objects, half art deco, half surgical. Then comes the strangest penetration shot ever - a close-up with shaven pudenda, transparent bondage girdle and a pair of bee wings.
In a recording studio, a drummer thrashes out a beat to the sound of 200,000 honey bees buzzing. The images unfold, getting progressively stranger and more lavish. Gilmore takes part in a rodeo on the Utah salt flats; Houdini does his act in a giant beehive; even the Mormon Tabernacle Choir make an appearance. So what does it all mean?
That's not really the question. The question is: how does Barney persuade us into fascinated speculation about what it might mean? This is the dazzling illusionist's trick of his intensely hermetic Cremaster films. They all partake of arcane ritual performance and are all based on a nexus of local culture or myth (here of Utah, elsewhere of Hungary or the Isle of Man), which is turned inside out, bent into an anagram of itself. So, apart from the tenuous Gilmore-Houdini connection, the film plays on Utah as a Mormon state that has a beehive as its emblem. The bees, if you like, cross-pollinate the imagery: hive structures, drone sounds, wax and pollen. But there are also references to other Barney motifs: notably the infinitely adaptable Cremaster logo, which forms the basis for 12 "Tribes of Israel" flags and the shape of the rodeo arena. The logo is everywhere - we're looking at a self-enclosed mythical world in which the existence of everything is determined by its part in the Cremaster project.
Barney boldly risks alienating his audience, yet the result proves irresistibly involving: you want to get to the bottom of the riddle, even while accepting that you never might, and that the riddle may have no bottom anyway. The films are so riveting because Barney uses cinematic resources as imaginatively as anyone currently working, from Peter Strietmann's lushly precise digital photography onwards.
Then there are all the questions Barney poses about the way a film fits together: are we getting fragments of an overall coherent story, or just a succession of bizarre images whose connections we have to take on trust? Is this a story with real relations of time and space, or are these ineffably weird tableaux linked like the cells of a beehive, parts of a bigger network?
The trade journal Variety, stumped for a category, classified Cremaster 2 as "experimental drama" - what else could you call a genre-crossing mixture that partakes of sci-fi, costume drama, real-crime TV movie, hard porn and tourist documentary? Cremaster 2 should finally establish Barney as not just an artist playing at film, but one of the most important new film-makers. But that's what infuriates me about Cremaster. Make films, as Barney does, with money from the art market, and categorise it as art, and there's no limit to where you can let your imagination go. But make them within the film industry, and call them movies, and you're obliged to saddle yourself with coherent narrative, proper characters and upbeat endings. If only the Cremaster series, and works like it, could have a knock- on effect in the film industry, the mainstream could profitably get a little stranger, and a lot freer.
• Cremaster 2 is at the Metro Cinema, London W1 (0171-734 1506), from Friday.
