Copyright © 2015 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2015 The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. University Press of Mississippi / Jackson Harmony Korine: Interviews Conversations with Filmmakers Series Gerald Peary, General Editor Throughout his career he has also continued as a mixed-media artist whose fields included music videos, paintings, photography, publishing, songwriting, and performance art. Surviving an early career burnout, he resurfaced with a trifecta of insightful works that built on his earlier aesthetic leanings: a surprisingly delicate rumination on identity ( Mister Lonely, 2007), a gritty quasi-diary film ( Trash Humpers, 2009) and a blistering portrait of American hedonism ( Spring Breakers, 2013), which yielded significant commercial success. With his audacious 1999 digital video drama Julien Donkey-Boy, Korine continued to demonstrate a penchant for fusing experimental, subversive interests with lyrical narrative techniques. He parlayed the success of Kids into directing the dreamy portrait of neglect Gummo two years later. Now approaching middle age, and more influential than ever, Korine remains intentionally sensationalistic and ceaselessly creative. He both intelligently observes modern social milieus and simultaneously thumbs his nose at them. Ever since his entry into the independent film scene as the irrepressible prodigy who wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark's Kids in 1992, Korine has retained his stature as the ultimate cinematic provocateur. 1973) remains one of the most prominent and yet subversive filmmakers in America. Bringing together interviews collected from over two decades, this unique chronicle includes rare interviews unavailable in print for years and an extensive, new conversation recorded at the filmmaker's home in Nashville.Īfter more than twenty years, Harmony Korine (b. Rather, it offers important insights about the role of negative affect within an ethics of waste.Harmony Korine: Interviews tracks filmmaker Korine's stunning rise, fall, and rise again through his own evolving voice. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. It should come as no surprise, then, that Gummo was widely greeted as an avant-garde failure. 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.
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