Love him or hate him, there is no getting around Matthew Barney’s prodigious capacity to generate symbolism. He doesn’t just come up with potent signs or borrow smartly from pre-existing value systems, tapping the residues of meaning such signs bring with them. Instead, he actually sets into motion whole hermetic systems in which signs, rituals, talismans, and uniforms generate narrative. There’s always an element of the obnoxious, pretentious bore about him, but he is a compelling bore.

Mr. Barney reminds me on various levels of William Blake, another genius bore who locked himself into a seemingly sealed-off universe. Like Blake, Mr. Barney nurtures private obsessions that link organically to public meanings without losing any of their weirdness. And like Blake, Mr. Barney cobbles together forms and language from a plethora of sources – in Mr. Barney’s case, sports, freemasonry, biology, big business, pageantry, Celtic history – without compromising the core. (Mr. Barney, it is true, has better luck in securing backers for his lavish enterprises than his impecunious predecessor.)

Where the two part ways is in how they structure their equations of art and belief, determining which is at the service of the other. For Mr. Barney, it would seem, belief systems are not ends in themselves so much as webbing in the bigger edifice that is art. His inner core is a vacuum that holds his eclectic symbols in constellation.

Mr. Barney’s latest film, “Drawing Restraint 9,” is accompanied by a show of new sculptures and drawings at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, “The Occidental Guest.” To his credit, Mr. Barney the cult moviemaker hasn’t forgotten his art roots (or collector base),nor do his shows look like a souvenir shop of studio props. The works at Gladstone relate thematically to the movie, but have a form and feeling of their own. There are no stills or video monitors relaying the film.

If anything, sculpture rather than film tops the hierarchy of mediums in Mr. Barney’s gesamtkunstwerk. His films are more about savoring props, performances, and symbolism than they are moving pictures driven by narrative. Mr. Barney loves to show the rituals by which ceremonies unfold and the industry with which things are fabricated, with hard-hatted crews patiently and efficiently going about their tasks. Film is the control freak’s way of having us perceive his objects fully in the round, and in a time and mood determined by their maker.

“Drawing Restraint 9,” Mr. Barney’s first movie since the completion of the five-part “Cremaster” series, is probably his most ambitious effort to date in mainstream cinematic terms. Slight and schematic as the plot is, you feel each one of the film’s 135 minutes. This is a visually sumptuous, relentlessly stylish work, accompanied by an exhilarating score composed by Mr. Barney’s co-star, his partner Bjork. She adds emotionality and narrative drive that her boyfriend, left to his own cool devices, would probably not have bothered with, galvanizing the work as decisively as Philip Glass does “The Hours.”

“Drawing Restraint 9” has little to do with drawing and less to do with restraint. The title relates to an ongoing series, initiated while Mr. Barney was a Yale undergraduate in the 1980s, in which he would attempt to draw while restrained by mountaineering ropes, or propelled by a trampoline.

It opens with a Japanese woman named Shizuka meticulously and exquisitely wrapping a million-year-old fossil. It is July 1946, and she is sending this family heirloom to General MacArthur to express gratitude at his removal of a whaling moratorium. We know this because Bjork sings the letter in English as Shizuka embellishes her final, tasteful fold of paper with a stick-on heraldic device that is the recurring logo of the “Drawing Restraint” series: an oval with a cross bar. We will see the same shape later as holding tank to be filled with petroleum jelly, on the deck of the Nisshin Maru, the whaling vessel on which most of the film’s action takes place. (Mr. Barney’s research is as sharp as Shizuka’s gift-wrapping – essential to his style is that all his weirdness be rooted in historic fact and hard science.)

Once the petroleum in the oval shaped structure has turned to jelly (a Barney movie has to have its Vaseline moment), slats are introduced to the crossbar area like sluice gates. This allows for the removal of a congealed rectangle of jelly, making way for a precious ambergris confiscated from a group of female divers.

We don’t see these props at Gladstone, but one related sculptural installation, titled “The Deportment of the Host,” looks like a holding tank that has cracked open, spewing forth slabs of jelly that recall the menacing ice-floes of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Arctic Shipwreck” in Hamburg. Made from cast thermo- and self-lubricating plastics, the surfaces look like glistening wax, giving them the requisite Barney kinkiness. In contrast to the movie, where the Nisshin Maru, in its ship-shape, gleaming efficiency, effortlessly weathers storms and strange rituals, “Torri,” the second large piece in the show, is a sprawling, dismembered tangle of beat en ventilation shafts and yanked-out wires, also in thermoplastics of strangely exquisite, nursery pastels.

In the film, the characters played by Mr. Barney and Bjork are identified solely as the Occidental Guests, which provides the title of the Gladstone show. They come on boats from different locales to the whaling ship, where attendants dress them with formal exactitude and prepare them for a traditional tea ceremony. Bjork is bathed in a huge tub in which oranges bob around, sliced in resemblance to the crossbar logo.

When a storm floods the chamber where the tea ceremony has taken place, the film takes a dramatic turn. Knives are produced (squeamish be warned) and the guests start slicing deeply into each other’s lower limbs, submerged by the floodwaters. Miraculously, their flesh has been transformed into synthetic blubber; the only bloodlike product of the incisions are red globules gracefully drifting by.

Although dismemberment starts to occur, the consensual couple retain stiff poses in their upper bodies, no one looks to be in pain, and decorum is maintained. The same punctilious sense of order established by the gift-wrapping remains in place. Passion is contained by procedure.

“The Occidental Guest” until May 13 (515 W. 24th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-206-9300). “Drawing Restraint 9” continues at IFC Center (323 Sixth Avenue, 212-924-7771).