HARMONY KORINE (1973)

CHRONICLER OF AMERICA’S UNDERBELLY

The writer behind one of the most controversial films of the 1990s transformed into an uncompromising filmmaker with an offbeat perspective of the world.

Harmony Korine was born in California but raised in Nashville, Tennessee. His father encouraged an interest in circuses, whose freak-show elements played a significant role in aspects of Korine’s work. Other influences included time spent living in a commune, which fed into the environment Korine created for Mister Lonely (2007), and a passion for the films of German filmmaker Werner Herzog, who stepped in front of the camera as a bullying father in Korine’s family drama Julien Donkey-Boy (1999).

After high school, Korine moved to New York. He hung out on the streets, picked up the vernacular and thought his future lay in professional skateboarding. It was while hanging out with friends that he encountered photographer and fellow skateboarder Larry Clark, who commissioned him to write about his experiences. The screenplay that became Kids (1995) was delivered three weeks later, and the film – a frank tale of sex and violence among teens – was seen by critics as a wake-up call regarding youth culture in the United States.

Korine’s films explore the underbelly of US society. His approach has attracted criticism: that his work is barely coherent and visually cacophonous. Others see a filmmaker breaking down film language and rebuilding it with a radically different grammar. Across five features as director and two as a writer, Korine has engaged with mental illness, life below the poverty line, dysfunctional childhood and the extremes of contemporary college life. Anyone shocked by Kids will likely have been aghast at Gummo (1997), his directorial debut, and Julien Donkey-Boy. They are as unconventional as Korine, whose antics outside of his films have attracted significant attention. Most notoriously, he embarked on the project Fight Harm (1999), which saw him provoking strangers to fight with him.

Until recently, Korine has remained an outlier on the landscape of US cinema. Both Mister Lonely and Trash Humpers (2009) evidenced his unwillingness to compromise. However, Spring Breakers (2012) saw him break through to a larger audience. It focuses on four college friends and their experience during spring break in the Florida town of St. Petersburg, where thousands of students party for the holidays. Wildly colourful and amoral in its portrait of the excesses of this hedonistic world, Korine’s film is a dayglow fever dream – a John Hughes film on acid.