Redoubt
Redoubt ("American Redoubt" is a conservative-libertarian movement, established in 2011, that seeks to establish Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming as safe havens for conservative Christians and Jews in the event of catastrophe) offers a contemporary take on mythology which Barney combines here with another of his preoccupations: humanity's relationship with the natural world; in this case the wilderness of the Sawtooth mountains of Idaho (the area where Barney grew up). With an experimental score by Johnathan Bepler, the two-hour-plus, dialogue-free film blends the ancient myth of Diana and Actaeon with contemporary American issues, including gun ownership, the paranoia of the government, and the reintroduction of wolves into the Sawtooth range after their close call with extinction (around the time of Barney's childhood).
Debruge argues that the use of drone cameras in the film "is suitably otherworldly, suggesting a point of view that alternates between the hunter and the hunted from the film's opening shots, alternating between a bloody animal carcass as seen from above and a skyward-pointing view of the bird of prey circling overhead". Debruge notes too, that, with only six human characters, the film's focus remains on the natural landscape, thus presenting the "human characters as trespassers into this snowy 'virgin' territory"; an idea reflected in the fact that the protagonist, Diana, and her two attendants, are also virgins.
Smee picked up on a talk given by Barney at Yale to mark the event of an exclusive screening of his film. Barney had spoken to his "converted" audience about "a kind of yearning one has to have a functionality to what one's doing - for the works to have some function". Smee, while sympathizing with Barney's view, argued that art is not (or should not be) a "teaching tool" and when it does "function" in this way the art and its audience become "too self-enclosed". Smee surmised, however, that Barney was mindful of his own predicament but that his "endlessly curious intelligence reaches out to the world in all its complexity". In fact, Smee suggested that the more "ingeniously elaborated and dazzlingly executed his work" the less considered it becomes and "the more bizarre, eccentric and nakedly pointless it appears".
