Harmony Korine - Themes and Influence

Themes and Influence

Much of Korine's work is based around the dark humor and absurdism involved in dysfunctional childhoods, mental disorders, and poverty. This is often incorporated into surrealist, non-linear forms and presented experimentally (see the mix of Polaroids, Super 8 and 35mm film that makes up Gummo). Blackface, tap-dance, and minstrelsy are common elements to Korine's work. "I'm a huge fan of vaudeville – like Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, and Al Jolson... There's this random tragedy associated with the decline of the vaudeville entertainer, which is a theme in Gummo that I completely stole from vaudeville." Like vaudeville, the narrative of Korine's work is abstract and works by association. Korine compares this concept to a book of private photos. On their own each photo would be seemingly random and devoid of context, but because they are compiled in one volume and presented in succession, a narrative exists. "That's how Gummo was written." Improvisation is also an important filmmaking technique for Korine, as a way to maintain his movies as "living thing." Korine does not try to write messages or meanings into his scripts, as he finds it belittling to the audience. With his films, Korine strives to retain a "margin of the undefined."

Despite the scorn of a majority of mainstream reviewers, he has won festival prizes at Venice and Rotterdam, among others, and established directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci and Gus Van Sant are outspoken proponents of Korine's work. On Gummo Van Sant said it "changed his life" and Bertolucci said Korine has "created a revolution in the language of cinema." A significant number of scholarly essays have been written on the importance of his oeuvre to film and art in general.

The Toronto International Film Festival writes, "Such is the dilemma with Korine and his remarkable career; for all the fireworks, there is an impressive coherence in the subject matter of his work. His four feature films all seek to shed light on a certain class of people: unique and bizarre individuals usually lumped under the heading of 'subculture.' ... His portraits come from many angles – the baroque stillness of Gummo contrasts radically with the rough-hewn melodrama of Julien Donkey-Boy. His last film, Mister Lonely, had an epic quality and interest in celebrity that Trash Humpers disdains, preferring instead a low-end surveillance-video look with frequent in-camera lighting distortions and a cinéma-vérité authenticity.

Recurrent in his work (with the exception perhaps of Mister Lonely) is a portrait of what Korine calls the "American Landscape." He recently stated "to me, the most beautiful thing in the world is an abandoned parking lot and a soiled sofa on the edge… with a street lamp off to the side. America seems like a series of abandoned parking lots, streetlights and abandoned sofas." Such a statement gives insight into Korine's complex aesthetic.

Korine has frequently been labeled as an enfant terrible and been accused of exploitation and self-indulgance, to which he has responded, "How can an artist be expected not to be self-indulgent? That's the whole thing that's wrong with filmmaking today... To me, art is one man's voice, one idea, one point-of-view, coming from one person." Korine feels there is no need to justify or explain the images he puts to the screen, in that they are simply the result of "a cinema of passion and obsession." "I mostly just make things to entertain myself and at the same time hope that there’s some type of audience that likes what I’m doing." Korine adds, "Film is like a dead art because of people not taking chances." To Korine, the only films that matter are the auteurist works.

In his films, Korine attempts to convey a poetic, or "ecstatic truth" as filmmaker and friend, Werner Herzog termed in his 1999 Minnesota declaration. Korine is also proponent of what he calls a "mistake-ist" artform. During Julien Donkey-Boy Korine went so far as to write a "Mistakist declaration", which has been published in his Collected Screenplays.

On the current state of cinema, Korine comments, "When I look at the history of film – the early commercial narrative movies directed by D.W. Griffith, say – and then look at where films are now, I see so little progression in the way they are made and presented, and I'm bored with that. Film can be so much more."

On looking for meaning in his films Korine states, "I think people will lose the film as soon as they start trying to figure out my logic or what I'm doing or while they're watching it start to dissect metaphors... I'm not really so interested in it working on a purely cerebral level. I'm much more concerned with it on an emotional level and that you leave feeling a certain way." Korine states that if there is at least one image that sticks with you after viewing the film, then it is a success.

Producer Cary Woods writes, "I think the best hope for cinema is allowing people who are artists to make a movie that isn't wholly ruled by screenplay structure... a storyteller, and he's gone out of his way to put images that are moving on the screen, and meaningful in some way."

As critic Roger Ebert said in his review of Julien Donkey-Boy, "Korine, who at 25 is one of the most untamed new directors, belongs on the list with Godard, Cassavetes, Herzog, Warhol, Tarkovsky, Brakhage and others who smash conventional movies and reassemble the pieces... Harmony Korine is the real thing, an innovative and gifted filmmaker whose work forces us to see on his terms."

In 1997, Korine's favorite writers were listed as James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, and Flannery O'Connor. Korine has noted British filmmaker Alan Clarke as an influence. (See Elephant)

In a 1999 Dazed and Confused magazine article Korine listed his top ten films as: Pixote by Hector Babenco, Badlands and Days of Heaven by Terrence Malick, Fat City by John Huston, Stroszek by Werner Herzog, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and A Woman Under the Influence by John Cassavetes, McCabe and Mrs. Miller by Robert Altman, Out of the Blue by Dennis Hopper and Hail Mary by Jean-Luc Godard.