The Cremaster Cycle is a series of five feature-length films, together with related sculptures, photographs, drawings, and artist's books, created by American visual artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney.


The Cremaster Cycle was made over a period of eight years (1994–2002) and culminated in a major museum exhibition organized by Nancy Spector of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which traveled to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Musée d'art Moderne in Paris from 2002-03. Barney's longtime collaborator Jonathan Bepler composed and arranged the soundtracks for the films. The series incorporates a multidisciplinary narrative that heavily references connections between real people, real places and real things personal to Barney himself, but are all fictionalized to some extent.


Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector has described the Cremaster cycle (1994–2002) as "a self-enclosed aesthetic system." The cycle includes the films as well as photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations the artist produced in conjunction with each episode. Its conceptual departure point is the male cremaster muscle, the primary function of which is to raise and lower the testes in response to temperature. The project is filled with anatomical allusions to the position of the reproductive organs during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation: Cremaster 1 represents the most "ascended" or undifferentiated state, Cremaster 5 the most "descended" or differentiated. The cycle repeatedly returns to those moments during early sexual development in which the outcome of the process is still unknown — in Barney's metaphoric universe, these moments represent a condition of pure potentiality. As the cycle evolved over eight years, Barney looked beyond biology as a way to explore the creation of form, employing narrative models from other realms, such as biography, mythology, and geology. Barney portrays, at various points, a satyr and Gary Gilmore. Ursula Andress portrays the Queen of Chain in Cremaster 5. Norman Mailer, Patty Griffin, and Dave Lombardo portray Harry Houdini, Nicole Baker, and Johnny Cash respectively in Cremaster 2. Richard Serra and Aimee Mullins portray Hiram Abiff and Sadhbh respectively, in Cremaster 3.


While thematically the Cremaster films are chronological in the numbered order, they were not made or released in the same manner. The order in which they were made is as follows:


The numerical order is the thematic order, while in order of production the films increased in production quality, ambition and scope, and they can alternatively be viewed in any order, as different views of a set of themes and preoccupations.


The films are significantly different in length; the longest (and last-made) is Cremaster 3, at over three hours, while the remaining four are approximately an hour each, for a total of approximately seven hours – #3 alone makes up almost half the total length of the cycle. Like Barney's other works, most of the films lack any particular dialogue with the exceptions being Cremaster 2 and 5, the latter of which is an opera sung in Hungarian.


An important precursor of The Cremaster Cycle is Drawing Restraint, which is also a biologically inspired multi-episode work in multiple media, also featuring the field emblem.

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