Harmony Korine Research Articles

Learning to Live-with Climate Change through Film: The Arche-Cinema of Gummo as Climating and Becoming-Climate

Abstract I am a cinematic being of the Anthropocene. As a concerned citizen and environmental educator, I immerse myself in film. Gummo is a 1997 film by Harmony Korine that deeply resonates with me as a testament to the capacity and desire for humanity to realise the potential to rise from the epochal fall of the Anthropocene. I propose that my relationship with Gummo as arche-cinema is not just a process of watching and interpreting Korine’s cinematic world, but also (re)projecting my dreams of a new reality for the whole-Earth ecosystem onto the world-out-there. I suggest that my entanglement with Gummo exemplifies my climating and becoming-climate as film in our current human-induced climate crises, and in this way, I argue that I am learning to live-with climate change through film.

Temporal Looping and Pleating in Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012)

This article is about the cinematic presentation of time, arguing that contemporary cinema increasingly draws on musical structures to organize images. Drawing on a Deleuzian conception of time in cinema, I propose and develop the idea of a morph-image. In the case of Spring Breakers, this musical structure is that of electronic dance music, that intensifies and amplifies experience through two primary temporal forms: looping and pleating. Time repeats and returns, brushing against itself. In so doing, Spring Breakers’ musical form expresses the tension between a closed or open future, what Nina Power has called the “weaponization of time.”

The Film Kids 25 Years On: A Qualitative Study of Rape Culture and Representations of Sexual Violence in Skateboarding

This article examines the 1995 fictional feature film Kids, which locates its story in skateboarding culture. The film reached its 25th anniversary in 2020; it is directed by Larry Clark and written by Harmony Korine, both recognizable figures in skateboarding, and it featured a cast of youth from the New York skateboarding scene. The research analyses narrative content that depicts sexual coercion and rape. Contemporary social and feminist theories of sexual violence, rape culture and media on the film inform the analysis. The discussion points to how the characters that the boys play embody forms of hegemonic masculinity, pointing to the social and cultural dimensions of male power and how sexual violence can be an element of that. The article also presents an occasion to reflect on such issues in skateboarding culture more widely, with emerging insights that can be useful to studies of other male-dominated youth cultures, lifestyle sports and subcultures.

On the Depths of Surface: Strategies of Surface Aesthetics in The Bling Ring, Spring Breakers and Drive

The films The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola, 2013), Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012), and Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011), were all dismissed for their depthlessness. This article argues that we need to explore the depths and variety of their engagement with surface in order to fully appreciate what these films are trying to say. The article proposes that these films in fact employ three different “strategies” of surface engagement, in and through their aesthetics; The Bling Ring relies on a sense of “skimming”, Spring Breakers engages ideas of “drifting”, while Drive promotes a sense of “gliding” or “coasting”. Analysis of these strategies of surface aesthetics reveals that the films make dialectic categories of depth and surface, sign and meaning, form and content, indistinguishable, and it is precisely in doing so that they offer complex critique on the crimes they display, and the state of our current hyper-mediated and networked world. These films are not only about the stories they tell but about how the very function that the films themselves perform is intricately intertwined with those stories. This makes the films self-reflexive and postmodern, but it also shows that surface itself, in the cinema, cannot and should not be dismissed as a monolithic, indeterminate nothing. The article argues that we must analyse and engage the depths of surface if we want to understand meaning in cinema today.

Deleuze, Žižek, Spring Breakers and the Question of Ethics in Late Capitalism

This article examines Harmony Korine's 2012 film, Spring Breakers. Arguing that Korine's film explores the bankruptcy of ethics in advanced capitalism, the article considers two predominate and contrasting theories of contemporary subjectivity: Slavoj Žižek's psychoanalytically-inspired conception of the subject as radical lack and Deleuze's affirmation of the subject through attention to affect and the virtual. In reference to Kant's radical reformulation of the moral law as an empty and tautological form with the concept of the categorical imperative, this article shows that Korine's allegory of the spring break adventure correlates the subject's eagerness to surmount any and all obstacles toward enjoyment to late stage capitalism's increasing encroachment on the absolute limit of deterritorialization. In so doing, the film suggests that neither Deleuze nor Žižek, affirmation nor lack, offer an effective ethical principle for the subject in the face of the real of global capital.

Harmony Korine’s <em>Trash Humpers</em>: From Alternative to Hipster

Harmony Korine’s <em>Trash Humpers</em>: From Alternative to Hipster

Alternative

Unconventional, uncommon, irregular, off-beat, counter to as in contradistinction to the popular. Here we look to the margins of film and media, practice and industry to explore alternative approaches to popular modes of thinking and doing. The theme of ‘alternative’ was borne from the 2016 Revelation Perth International Film Festival’s academic conference, a wonderful two days of discussion with an emphasis on fringe film and media. A number of the authors who have contributed to this issue were a part of this conference, with others contributing from the wider academic community.Finding the alternative can come to mean a number of discursive approaches in its collision with film and media more broadly – from alternative modes of storytelling, alternative ways of producing and consuming film and media, to alternative and oppositional ideologies. Subversions of the mainstream, wherever that may be found by scholar and critic alike, lead to an astonishing array of alternative voices in the film and media landscape. This issue of M/C Journal presents a number of diverse takes on the word ‘alternative’. Ian Dixon’s feature article, “Film Writing Adapted for Game Narrative: Myth of Error?” asks if the writers of video games can learn from traditional film storytelling in navigating alternative rules for new media. Following on for this, Stuart Bender’s article “You Are Not Expected to Survive: Affective Friction in the Combat Shooter Game Battlefield 1” looks at alternative narrative structures in popular shooter games drawing on affect and phenomenology. Turning to other media modes, Wes Hill explores the turning alternative cultural tides in Harmony Korine’s film Trash Humpers. Sean Tiffee’s “The Rhetorical Alternative in Neurocinematics” explores the emerging interdisciplinary field of neurocinematics, combing neuroscience and film studies to find an alternative way of understanding audience. In “Emotional Memory Forever: The Cinematography of Paul Ewing”, Andrew Ewing takes an alternative approach to ethnography in looking to his father’s home movies as an example of amateur image making and its lasting legacy. From film to television, Bridgette Glover’s article “Alternative Pathway to Television: Negotiating Female Representation in Broad City’s Transition from YouTube to Cable” explores the uninhibited landscape of the web to the more traditional medium of television. From television to music, Adam Haupt’s “Mix En Meng It Op: Emile YX?’s Alternative Race and Language Politics in South African Hip-Hop” breaks down Emile YX?’s work as an alternative take on mainstream U.S. and South African hip-hop. In line with alternative takes on the traditional, Katie Lavers and Jon Burtt ‘s article “Briefs and Hot Brown Honey: Alternative Bodies in Contemporary Circus” explores how conventional notions of the body in circus/cabaret are challenged and subverted in the work of two Brisbane-based companies. Looking to print media, in “Before Alternative Voices: The Sydney Gazzette and New South Wales Advertiser”, Rachel Franks writes on the early singular voice in Australian news media that paved the way for the alternative and multiple voices in the industry today. In “The Uses of Hate: On Hate as a Political Category”, Pansy Duncan draws on recent work in affect theory to assess the value of the labour of hate-attribution in which many liberal commentators, both in media studies and in the media proper, have become caught up. Concluding the issue is Lelia Green and Kylie Stevenson’s article “A Ten-Year-Old’s Use of Creative Content to Construct an Alternative Future for Herself”. This article investigates the alternative power of engaging with creative media as a means of inspiring innovative visions for a satisfying and potent future for disadvantaged children. The articles in this issue of M/C Journal harness some of those voices that explore the ‘alternative’ in a range of media.

Harmony Korine’s “Break from Reality”: Spring Breakers as Candy-Coloured Neon Noir

Harmony Korine’s “Break from Reality”: Spring Breakers as Candy-Coloured Neon Noir

Video Aesthetics in Cinema and Video Art

The article is devoted to the genesis and unique semantic characteristics of video aesthetics pertinent to both auteur cinema and modern art (video art, in particular). Being a kind of common denominator for these art forms, video aesthetics manifests itself differently in the art gallery and film theatre, in the duration of a video work and a feature film, in the mentality of a film director and an artist. The author makes an attempt to reveal the methods of reciprocal influence of the two art forms, their specific languages connected through video aesthetics illustrated by the work of Harmony Korine, Vincent Gallo, Philippe Grandrieux and Philippe Parreno.

Bored and Boringer: avant-garde and trash in Harmony Korine's Gummo

While bearing all the formal stamps of the realist avant-garde, Harmony Korine's Gummo (1997) is animated not by the powerful, oppositional emotions of ‘shock’ or ‘anger’, but by a morally and politically devalued ‘boredom' – a vacuous, trivial affect long associated with the consumer culture that the avant-garde traditionally pits itself against. It should come as no surprise, then, that Gummo was widely greeted as an avant-garde failure. Contending, however, that recent radical shifts in the status and dominion of emotion convert boredom from consumer culture's signature affect to consumer culture's emotional trash, this article re-reads Gummo’s tedium as a function not of the film's avant-garde failure but of its effort to repurpose the avant-garde for changed economic and social co-ordinates. Exploring the convergence of emotional and literal trash through a semiotic analysis of the film's junk-filled, over-stuffed frames, I will suggest that precisely as a trivial, vacuous and a-political feeling – as our emotional trash or affective waste – boredom possesses an unexpected utility to a newly configured avant-garde project.

Spring Breakers. Film. Directed by HarmonyKorine. A24 Films, 2012.

<b>Spring Breakers</b>. Film. Directed by HarmonyKorine. A24 Films, 2012.

Dogme 95 and disabled identity on film

ABSTRACTDogme 95 was a film and video movement that energized Danish film production and provoked reams of publicity and criticism. The conceit of the movement was to rail against aesthetic considerations and to make films in a uniform fashion; to move beyond tired formalism and find freedom within a rigid set of self-imposed rules. Two works produced during the initial years of the movement—Lars von Trier's Idioterne (1998) and Harmony Korine's Julien Donkey-Boy (1999)—remain significant for cannily linking the movement's anti-aesthetic aims with a concern for and/or fascination with representations of mental and physical disability. Both films use that kinship between form and content as a starting point and then up the ante by having actors encounter actual disability within fictional contexts. A comparison of these two works calls attention to divergent methods of representing disabled identity in fiction film and the ethical quandaries therein. In my analysis of the films' narrative and aesthetic approaches to disability, I argue that Idioterne and Julien Donkey-Boy challenge both the general illusory tendencies of Hollywood-style cinema as well as Hollywood cinema's specific shortcomings concerning accurate, nuanced representations and the prevalence of depictions of disability. Though Dogme's relationship with disability is ambivalent and leaves a corpus of contradictions, these films utilize a ‘disabled aesthetic’. They are formally dis-abled when judged in the context of professional standards of production and are valuable for the ways in which they disrupt conventional cultural and filmic depictions of disability.

Debasing the voice: Subversive vocality in Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers

Abstract Harmony Korine, one-time enfant terrible of the American cinema, returns to infamy with the uncategorizable Trash Humpers (2009), a ‘found footage’-style, faux home-movie that documents the abhorrent acts of four sociopathic ‘elders’ in the nondescript suburbs of the American South. It is a film that has garnered attention due to its goading amateur aesthetic (the film is shot on VHS and purportedly edited on two VCRs), non-narrative approach and pro-filmic oddities, including the titular characters literally humping trash while donning lifelike geriatric masks. However, despite its arresting and oft-perplexing visual content, it is the film’s unusual treatment of the soundtrack – or more specifically, the voice – that intimates meaning beyond mere provocation. Drawing on Michel Chion’s theories of vocal disembodiment in the cinema, as well as Korine’s continued remarks on the film’s childhood origins, this article proposes that by intentionally decoupling the voice from the body and divesting it of its linguistic capabilities, Trash Humpers presents a version of vocality regressed to a pre-lingual state, before its ideological subjugation to the body through language. This, in turn, informs the childlike rendering of the trash humpers, who seem to revel in libidinal fixations of the past. By utilizing the voice as a non-verbal, autonomous entity, Trash Humpers demonstrates the voice’s capacity to incite meaning outside the image, and furthers Korine’s stature as a boundary pushing film-maker.

Cinematic affect and the ethics of waste

Abstract This article considers questions of affect and ethics in relation to three films about waste: Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (1999), Lucy Walker’s Waste Land (2010), and Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009). Drawing from new materialist models, the article situates the ethical import of these very different films in relation to the way that they present waste as a vibrant and affectively charged medium through which we might rethink relations between people and things. It argues that a careful evaluation of the way these films generate and manage affect is crucial to an understanding of the kinds of ethical work each might be said to perform. While The Gleaners and I and Waste Land emphasize the uplifting feelings that can be generated from trash if we learn to see it differently, Trash Humpers rejects the activist, humanist ethos of Varda’s and Walker’s films in favour of an avant-garde impulse to degrade and defile. However, despite its nihilistic approach to its subject matter, this article argues that Trash Humpers’ feel-bad aesthetic does not rule out the possibility of ethical engagement. Rather, it offers important insights about the role of negative affect within an ethics of waste.

Call for papers: Filth

From the Wellcome Collection’s 2011 exhibition Dirt: the filthy reality of everyday life , via Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2012 nominee Pieter Hugo’s images of Ghanaian refuse tips, to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (2010), filth is having its cultural moment. Filth has a wide range of material associations, including dirt, waste, rubbish, and the human body. Filth has moral connotations: of sexuality, but also in the context of political discourse. Filth is unstable and insidious; definitions of what constitutes filth are subjective and its boundaries are impossible to circumscribe.

‘Seeing or believing’: Harmony Korine and the cinema of self-destruction

The films of writer and director, Harmony Korine (Gummo (1997) and Julien Donkey-Boy (1999)), are considered in terms of the cultural positioning of American ‘independent film making’. The article is critical of overemphasized associations with the work of Larry Clark and offers an in-depth account of Korine's Eurocentric and highly stylized response to avant-garde film-making processes. The article develops a critical account of Korine's various techniques identified as a new form of realism that challenges the traditional notions of political and cultural identities inherent to considerations of American ‘place’. Artaudian surrealism, still-life painting and Dogme 95 inform the treatment of Korine's endeavour to unearth hidden and imaginary landscapes resistant to generalized themes of location and orientation in American film-making.

Harmony Korine‘s Gummo: The Compliment of Getting Stuck with a Fork

Dismissed by most critics, including even those sympathetic to alternative cinema, Harmony Korine‘s Gummo (1997) presents a tabloid look at the dark underside of adolescence. It aims to provoke its audience by pushing the boundaries of acceptable good taste. In Gummo, Korine employs a more experimental collage technique in which scenes are linked, not by the cause and effect of conventional plot, but by the elusive logic of free association. This essay contextualizes Korines work within skateboard culture and the recent Modern Gothic trend toward creepy, angst ridden, and death-obsessed work by younger contemporary American artists. It argues that Gummo‘s real achievement rests on its unusual narrative syntax – the way Korine is able to weave together the films disparate scenes and events to create a viscerally assaulting, Modern Gothic portrait of the notion of “difference” in its various manifestations.

: Gummo . Harmony Korine, Cary Woods.

: Gummo . Harmony Korine, Cary Woods.