Drawing Restraint 9 narrative location Japan
Drawing Restraint 9 is a 2005 film project by visual artist Matthew Barney consisting of a feature-length film, large-scale sculptures, photographs, drawings, and books. The Drawing Restraint series consists of 19 numbered components and related materials. Some episodes are videos, others sculptural installations or drawings.  Barney created Drawing Restraint 1-6 while still an undergraduate at Yale University and completed Drawing Restraint 16 in 2007 at London's Serpentine Gallery.  With a soundtrack composed by Björk, Drawing Restraint 9 is an unconventional love story set in Japan. The narrative structure is built upon themes such as the Shinto religion, the tea ceremony, the history of whaling, and the supplantation of blubber with refined petroleum for oil.
The film primarily takes place aboard the Japanese factory whaling vessel, the Nisshin Maru, in the Sea of Japan, as it makes its annual journey to Antarctica. Two storylines occur simultaneously on the vessel: one on deck and one beneath. The narrative on deck involves the process of casting a 25-ton petroleum jelly sculpture (one of Barney’s signature materials), which rivals the scale of a whale. Below deck, the two main characters participate as guests in a tea ceremony, where they are formally engaged after arriving on the ship as strangers. As the film progresses, the guests go through an emotional and physical transformation slowly transfiguring from land mammals into sea mammals, as they fall in love. The petroleum jelly sculpture simultaneously passes through changing states, from warm to cool, and from the architectural back to the primordial. The dual narratives, the sculptural and the romantic, come to reflect one another until the climactic point at which they become completely mutual.
Drawing Restraint 9 premiered at the 62nd Venice Film Festival and was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2005. IFC Films acquired the U.S. theatrical rights to Drawing Restraint 9 and distributed the film to screen in 18 cities across the U.S. in the fall of 2006.Narrative and imagery
The film opens with the careful, ceremonial wrapping of two unidentifiable organic objects in several layers of carefully folded decorative paper, an activity known in Japanese as tsutsumi or orikata, sealed with twine and gold field emblems and finished with a sliver of white shell. The centre strips of the field emblems, a recurring symbol in Barney's works, are then pulled off, a frequently repeated motif throughout the film. The scene moves to Nagasaki bay where a celebratory procession of dancers, animals and floats approaches the docks as the crew of the whaling ship finish construction on the shore.
After the opening credits, a field emblem mould is assembled on the deck of the Nisshin Maru and filled with molten petroleum jelly from one of the vehicles in the celebratory procession. One of the 'Occidental Guests', played by Björk, waits on another shore with her gaze directed out to sea. The other Occidental Guest, Matthew Barney, waits on a docking rig in a large fur coat. In a third location a group of young women at the water's edge, pearl divers, apply grease to each other's skin in preparation for the dive. Separately, the Occidental Guests are picked up by small motorised vessels and carried towards the Nisshin Maru. The pearl divers enter the water with their collection barrels, hyperventilate to improve their lung capacity and make the first dive. Mayumi Miyata is shown playing the shō over the scene with a string of pearls entwined in her hair and hanging down her exposed back.
The pearl divers come across a long, floating mass of compacted organic material, a sculpture from Barney's repertoire titled and here representing ambergris, an extremely valuable organic material produced as waste by whales. Whilst they keenly examine it, the Nisshin Maru leaves dock in a festive cloud of coloured ribbons and excited, screaming children. In the ship's galley, the chef cleans his knives and utensils, boils shrimp and cuts blocks of grey, layered jelly into plated portions using a field emblem mould. The central strip of the top layer of each field emblem is incised in order to allow the ship's crew, to whom the jelly is served, to pull it away. The chef goes through the ship's mess, filling each central void with shrimp and pomegranate seeds.