‘Hoist’ Synopsis:
Hoist was shot in Bahia, Salvador as one facet of a longer film titled DE LAMA LÂMINA. Hoist is the literal underbelly of that project: a non-site through which the history, ritual, mythology, and deities invoked in DE LAMA LÂMINA have been refracted and processed. It is a film about the meeting of chthonic libidinal energy and the destructive forces of technology. Hoist describes the encounter between the two central characters of the film; the so-called ‘Green Man’ and a fifty-ton deforestation Caterpillar truck under which he is suspended. Following the three acts of traditional film narrative, it is structured according to the three phases of description, situation and condition. While the initial two phases relate to the definition of Hoist as ‘an apparatus or method for lifting a load and shifting it laterally by an elevating means applied through a support from which a flexible member freely suspends a load engager,’ the third or final condition of the film suggests the imperfect consummation of the human and the mechanistic. Suspended beneath the vehicle the ‘Green Man’ is both part of and subservient to the undercarriage of this vast machine. Yet, like the deity, Ogum to which DE LAMA LÂMINA is dedicated, the sexuality of Hoist is ambivalent. It is an exploration of the idea of the sexual transmission of man and machine, flesh and metal, will and submission for which the film itself becomes an autoerotic vehicle transporting the viewer towards the possibility of such unlikely union. Imagined as the ultimate strap-on, the truck is the physical fetish that allows the expectations of pain, danger and gratification it carries to be transformed into the psychosexual prosthetic essential to all pornographic fantasy.

Director : Matthew Barney
Duration : 14 minutes
Director of Photography : Peter Strietmann
Format : HD
Music by : Jonathan Beplet
‘Hoist’ © 2005, Matthew Barney