Redoubt

Matthew Barney’s latest film Redoubt follows six characters through a series of mysterious confrontations in the wild landscape of the Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho. The film is a free adaptation of the myth of Diana, the goddess of hunting and nature, and Actaeon, a hunter who violates her intimacy and is punished for it. The landscape, both as a setting and as a subject, has long been at the center of the artist’s work: here, classic, cosmological and American myths confront each other on man’s role in the natural world. The protagonists, in an attempt to establish their place in the wild, communicate without dialogue, through gestures and choreographies. The title derives from the name of the separatist movement American Redoubt, widespread in the region where the film was shot, intended as a reference to isolation and wilderness.