From 1995 to 2002, avant-garde artist Matthew Barney wrote, directed, and starred in the Cremaster Cycle, five offbeat films featuring unusual situations and bizarre characters. Since 1987, he has also been working on the Drawing Restraint series, in which he uses physical weights and barriers to make the creation of his art more difficult--and more rewarding in the end. In 2005 he released DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, a film about a man (Barney) and a woman (Björk, Barney's real-life wife) who board a Japanese whaling ship and participate in some strange rituals and ceremonies involving a tank filling up with 45,000 pounds of petroleum jelly. Director Alison Chernick documents the making of DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 in MATTHEW BARNEY: NO RESTRAINT, mixing in clips from the film, behind-the-scenes interviews, and home-movie footage of Barney playing high-school football. She also examines Barney's entire career, speaking with gallery owner Barbara Gladstone, New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, and Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, which presented a major exhibition on the Drawing Restraint series, including a screening of the film, in the summer of 2005. It is not essential to have seen DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 before seeing MATTHEW BARNEY: NO RESTRAINT, which is more than just a making-of documentary; it's about the creative process itself. The ethereal music is provided by Björk and Mayumi Miyata.