Harmony Korine: Directing On The Edge Of Madness
New York Times
By Graham Fuller
NEW YORK -- Cinema history is punctuated by the work of visionary mavericks who will go to any lengths to get their films made, and who require their collaborators to share their obsessive dreams. Erich von Stroheim, who subjected his crew to misery during the filming of the climactic scenes of Greed [1924] in blistering temperatures in Death Valley, boasted, "I was going to metamorphose the 'movies' into an art -- a composite of all arts. Fight for it! And die for it, if need be! Well, fight I did. And die I almost did, too!"
Stroheim was matched in brinkmanship by Werner Herzog, who not only decided to make the documentary La Soufriere [1977] on the Guadeloupe Volcano after hearing it was about to erupt, but allegedly made his star, Klaus Kinski, work at gunpoint during the filming of Aguirre, The Wrath Of God [1972] in the Peruvian Jungle. Returning to the Amazon for Fitzcarraldo [1982] Herzog echoed the fanatical quest of the film's main character by hiring hundreds of Indians to pull a steamship over a mountain. Several were killed during production.
The latest would - be member of this club is Harmony Korine, the young, prodigiously talented writer of Kids [1995] and writer - director of Gummo [1997] and julien donkey - boy, which will be shown at the New York Film Festival before its October 15 release. While Korine took his cameras into some squalid situations -- most notably a cockroach - infested house -- during the filming of Gummo, he has yet to lay his life on the line in the same way his friend and mentor Herzog has done. Yet he aspires to -- or at least did so until a few months ago.
"For the longest time I was willing to die for film," he said in an interview. "When I make a film, it consumes me to such a degree that it feels it's my only purpose for living. My relationships are damaged, I don't know how to tie my shoes and I can't make my bed. Or I can, but I don't think about these things, and my life suffers because of that."
Actress Chloe Sevigny agreed: "He's a miserable wreck when he's not working." Ms. Sevigny, who is Korine's girlfriend and has known him since both were 17, is a regular in his films. "Harmony's always going to need other people around to look after him," she said.
One reason Korine is no longer willing to kill himself for his work is his experience making a film he has now abandoned. So slight he looks about 18 despite the wispy beard sprouting from his chin. Korine, who is 25, had himself videotaped fighting strangers on the streets of Manhattan. "I wanted to make a cross between a Buster Keaton film and a snuff film," he said. "My intention was to fight every demographic, but I fought a bouncer who broke my ankle and three ribs, and I got arrested three times. It was starting to get painful, and then my mother found out and got really worried. So I promised her I'd go see a shrink, which I did."
Korine acknowledged that he had been behaving self - destructively. "This was during a period when I was losing my mind," he said. "I'm now beginning to regain it a bit. It was maybe a way of punishing myself for something. I am now trying to find some kind of medium between making the movies I need to make and surviving as a human being."
During Korine's childhood, much of it spent in the Appalachians. His father, Sol, was an itinerant documentary filmmaker whose interests ranged from circus clowns to moonshiners. Korine eventually went to live with his grandmother, Joyce Korine, in Queens, New York City. [Her house is the setting for julien donkey - boy. Korine attended New York University as an English major, quitting after one semester. A meeting with photographer Larry Clark led to his writing, at the age of 18 and in three weeks, the script for Kids, Clark's controversial 1995 film about promiscuous teenagers.
After another script he wrote for Clark was shelved, Korine directed Gummo in the Tennessee environs of his youth. That tale of two adolescent cat killers was not only a simultaneously ugly and beautiful antidote to Hollywood narrative structures; it was also Korine's first excursion into what he calls a new film grammar, a kaleidoscopic mix of realistic and surrealistic scenes not necessarily connected to one another. "After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated," he said. "The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal."
julien donkey - boy, a more mature [if not less graphic] film than Gummo is the harrowing story of a paranoid schizophrenic that was inspired by Korine's uncle, a long -term patient at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens. Without so much as a story, the movie simply follows Julien around: From the opening sequence, in which he kills a little boy, through the time he spends in an institute for the blind, to the streets, a skating rink, and so on.
Korine had wanted to make a film about his uncle for some time. "Greta Garbo had a schizophrenic uncle named Cromwell," he cryptically wrote in his 1998 novel, A Crackup At The Race Riots an abstruse collection of musings that painted an ironic portrait of life at its most whimsically quotidian and spiritually bleak.
Julien, the film's tormented protagonist, who reveals an affectionate nature during his moments of lucidity, lives dysfunctionally with his ranting father, his dreamy pregnant sister, his brother, who fancies himself a wrestler, and his silent grandmother. The father is played by Herzog, the sister by Ms. Sevigny, the brother by the newcomer Evan Neumann and grandma by Joyce Korine. Julien is played by Scottish actor Ewen Bremner, who prepared for the role by visiting Korine's uncle in Creedmoor and working in a hospital for six weeks. "His portrayal of Julien was so intense," said Ms. Sevigny, "That I can no longer talk to Ewen as Ewen."
Korine claims that had Bremner overidentified with his role and lost his bearings, it would have been in a good cause. "I knew the film would be fake if, when I said 'Cut,' Ewen had said, 'Can I have a cappuccino now?' If Ewen had lost his mind forever, I would be sad, but at the same time it would have been worth it. I demand everything from the people I make my films with. I demand their blood."
Of course, he made this troubling statement safe in the knowledge that Bremner had survived with his faculties intact. And he admitted that he had been relieved when the shoot was over. One cannot help thinking, however, of the British prisoner of war, played by Michael Bryant in the BBC drama series Colditz, who persuaded his commanding officer to let him feign madness to secure his release under international law. The soldier succeeded only too well: He went insane in the attempt, leaving his officer full of regret.
Bremner got the role of Julien after Korine abandoned the idea of casting his institutionalized uncle or another schizophrenic or even himself. The actor was not scarred, he said, either by his immersion in the character or by his director's compulsiveness.
"Harmony's not by any stretch of the imagination an easygoing guy or a perfect citizen," Bremner said. "But one of the things I respect about him is that he's fearless. He's not going to pull any punches in the way he goes about making his films. He uses what he's got -- his fear, his love and his pain -- but he never allows any of that to get in the way. Nothing does, really."
Far from thinking Korine callous, Bremner has paid him tribute by calling his newborn daughter Harmony. "My partner chose the name," Bremner said. "I thought she was joking when she suggested it. It's not to do with the film particularly, but simply because Harmony is inspiring."
Korine's fervent approach to filmmaking was outlined in his confession to the Dogme collective of Danish directors, including Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who in 1995 issued a manifesto of rules to counter "the film of illusion" and "personal taste."
In submitting julien donkey - boy for the group's seal of approval, Korine wrote: "If I was ever to make a 'western,' for instance, and a horse died because I asked too much from the stallion, I would not shed a tear simply because it died by my command. I would weep only if the horse died off camera. Cinema sustains life. It captures death in its progress. Thus the horse dies for the world as did Christ himself."
The Dogme brethren must film with hand - held cameras on location and eschew unnatural light, optical work, produced sound, music, superficial action, props not found on the locations and the cult of the director. Largely obedient to this creed, julien donkey - boy broke a few of the commandments: For example, Ms. Sevigny was not truly pregnant [Korine confessed in his statement that he had not had time to impregnate her before filming began].
The fine distinctions between what does and does not make a Dogme film may be forgotten in the dismay that Korine's film is likely to engender. Like Gummo, which Janet Maslin reviled in her New York Times review as "the worst film of the year," and "An aimless vision of Midwestern teenage anomie, complete with drugs, garbage, dead cats and neat tricks like turning off Granny's respirator." julien donkey - boy is a pullulating collage of images that many will find unpalatable: A Thalidomide - maimed man playing the drums with drumsticks held between his toes; blind people demonstrating that you really have to be able to see to go bowling; Julien yowling in various states of degradation, and scenes involving a fetus.
To dismiss these images as grotesque or exploitative, though, would be to misinterpret Korine's intentions. The characters have been filmed neither patronizingly nor with voyeuristic relish, but with tenderness and humour.
There is the same overarching humanity in the film that Tod Browning brought to his circus sideshow performers in Freaks [1932] or Herzog to the midget cast of Even Dwarfs Started Small [1970].
"I think it would be a worse kind of discrimination not to use people because of the way they look or because of their handicap or their strangeness," said Korine. "You can show Tom Hanks stuttering or Dustin Hoffman doing his 'Rain Man' thing and they win Oscars for playing cute, lovable mentally insane people. That makes me angry, because as soon as you show someone screaming with fear at the voices they hear in their heads, puking on themselves or punching themselves in the face, it becomes 'exploitation.' But to me it becomes something meaningful."
Korine cites the films of Jean - Luc Godard, British director Alan Clarke, who died in 1990, and Herzog among his influences. The drive to make uncompromising movies at any cost is clearly part of the affinity between him and Herzog.
"Harmony's original intention to play my son in his film was metaphorical, of course," said Herzog. What does he think of Korine's aesthetic?
"When I saw a piece of fried bacon fixed to the bathroom wall in Gummo, it knocked me off my chair. He's a very clear voice of a generation of filmmakers that is taking a new position. It's not going to dominate world cinema, but so what?"
Korine's self - dramatizing zeal for art over life borders more on the naive than the unconscionable. Less messianic in person than his take - no - prisoners stance would suggest, he is a gifted filmmaker with a disturbing world view and infectious passion. In a movie environment clogged with opportunists and journeymen, he is much needed.
Perhaps Vinterberg best summed him up when he said: "Harmony has a haunting relationship to his filmmaking, which is creating almost a mythology around his work. I believe it's a matter of life or death for him. Everybody who's involved with a certain serious level of emotional life on screen has that kind of experience, but whereas others struggle to have a life next to their films, I think Harmony gave in."
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