![]() Countless other nameless faces frequent the film, playing equally lurid and frightening parts in the bleak and hopeless tale. At the core of the story are three teenage protagonists-Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), whose favourite pastime is ‘de-virginising’ young girls his underling Casper (Justin Pierce) who, among other things, dabbles in hard drugs and Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) who has recently contracted AIDS from Telly. The script was insightful and perceptive, chronicling the lives of teenagers in mid ’90s New York City with startling honesty, depicting their forays into gang culture, underage sex, drug use, disease and crime. This wide-eyed fascination with the goings-on of the environment around him is evident in the script that the then 19 year-old Korine wrote for Larry Clark’s controversial feature debut, Kids (1995). ” (5) In a profile of Korine for The Guardian, Sean O’Hagan clarified these ‘negative influences’, claiming that Korine is “obsessed by the more extreme detritus of American popular culture-tabloid TV, gangsta rap, deviant sex.” (6) Korine has cited cinematic influences in Cassavetes, Godard, Herzog and Fassbinder (4), but has also stated that he is “influenced by negative things as well as what. In New York, he immersed himself in the city’s repertory cinemas that screened auteurist films from Europe and the American avant-garde, but he was equally fascinated by the developing youth skateboard culture and the dilapidation of the city streets-the hobos, the sex workers, the scum. ![]() This combination of influences was further reinforced by his encounters of the varied forms of life in New York City, to where he relocated with his family when in his teens. These circumstances may well have influenced the initial formation of Korine’s aesthetic-typified by the combination of highbrow intellectualism juxtaposed by the banality of the less salubrious a bastion of high-concepts in surroundings saturated with mediocrity and simple-mindedness. In such an inconspicuous, even mediocre environment Korine was anything but, attending a ‘progressive’ school and, with the influence of his father, discovering the joys of cinema. Although his inventive descriptions of his parents have differed from being “trotskyites” (2) to secretive recluses, (3) it has been said that his father was in fact a director of public access documentaries for American television channel PBS and his mother stayed at home with Harmony and his two siblings. Korine was born in suburban California and raised in Tennessee, both strongholds of one of his favourite subject matters-middle-class America. In investigating the factors that have influenced the development of his idiosyncratic style, Korine’s upbringing and family background offers some pivotal clues. He approaches cinema like nobody before him and, accordingly, should be considered a film ‘great’. Still in his 20s, Korine already truly embodies the ideals of the auteurist tradition. It is this desire to redefine the art form rather than rehash past film traditions that sets him apart from other contemporary directors. It is clear that Korine is a true original, boasting an inimitable slant on his craft and a vision that he is determined to achieve at any cost. He may not have produced an enormous quantity of work, but these films- Gummo (1997) and julien donkey-boy (1999)-reveal his considerable talent and a filmic mastery that belies his age and experience in the industry. I align myself with this view and assert that, in my opinion, Harmony Korine is indeed a ‘great’ director. Equally, it could also be claimed that his detractors simply do not want to understand him, renouncing the unknown and succumbing to the age-old paradigm of rejecting the attempts of a new generation to redefine an art form because it is too taxing and challenging. In effect, a strong case could be made that Harmony Korine is vastly misunderstood. ![]() However, there is also a group of people who champion the work of Harmony Korine and consider these unfavourable views to be ignorant and desperate. Consequently, Korine is not even vaguely seen as a major power in contemporary film. Widespread derision has focused on the absence of fully developed story lines and conventional structure in his films his obscure and almost demented aesthetic sensibility and claims that he intentionally sets out to shock his audience. Even more telling is the fact that Korine has continually attracted condemnation towards his distinctive directorial style from critics and members of the film industry. Most would automatically rule out any consideration of ‘greatness’ due to his low output of films, only having completed two feature length productions to date. ![]() To a sizeable majority of film enthusiasts, the question of Harmony Korine being considered a ‘great’ filmmaker is a ludicrous notion.
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