American arthouse directors typically seem like the more hygienic bunch compared to the scuzz and sleaze of their European counterparts, but the exception to the rule is Harmony Korine. The writer-director, who’s been making movies since he was 19, is known for his brand of deeply discomforting, maybe even offensive films about life on the fringes. There are teenage skaters moping about 90s New York and aimless folk in a tornado-ravaged town; party girls-turned-hard criminals and pot-obsessed wasters in Florida. There is no single film in Harmony Korine’s oeuvre that everybody respects, which only makes the minority who love everything he’s made even more fervent in their defence of his work.
As he celebrates his 50th birthday (though he may still be 48 — reports of his age greatly differ), now may be the best time to reflect on a half-century of a rebellious master at work. Here’s where to begin with the work of Harmony Korine.
The entry point is… Gummo (1997)
Where better to start on the Harmony journey than with his directorial debut? Arguably his most famous in arthouse circles, this 1997 film is set in a town called Xenia in Ohio, as its citizens crawl back into consciousness following a tornado that turned it on its head. It has the staple qualities of Harmony’s best work: a scatty, non-linear narrative, a cast of majority non-actors, and a setting unlike anything you think even exists in the real world. Divisive upon release, when the legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog saw it, he said it “knocked me off my chair”.
Necessary viewing? Julien Donkey-Boy (1999)
Werner Herzog was such a fan of Harmony’s work that he agreed to star in his follow-up feature post-Gummo. Julien Donkey-Boy stars Trainspotting’s Ewen Bremner as a deeply schizophrenic young man trying to make sense of himself and the world around him as his illness impacts his family. It was produced by Harmony following the Dogme 95 manifesto, a subversive filmmaking movement pioneered by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in the mid-90s, which favoured naturalism, real setting, handheld camera work and no superficial effects. Lars approved of Harmony’s work, and the bleak and deeply ugly film remains one of his greatest to date.
The one everyone’s seen is… Spring Breakers (2012)
Anyone who lived through the Spring Breakers era remembers it as the strange coalescence of overexposed pop culture and grimy underground cinema. In it, some of the most visible stars of the kids TV era — namely Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez — joined forces with Ashley Benson and Harmony’s wife, Rachel Korine, to play a quartet of raucous girls on their spring break. But what seems like standard, coked-up fun soon descends into darker waters as they meet a drug dealer, played by a career-best James Franco, who welcomes them into his world. This remains Harmony’s only film to make a sizeable profit at the box office, and the one that subsequently introduced a generation of film lovers to his earlier work.
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The under-appreciated gem is… Trash Humpers (2009)
After his, at the time, highest budget film Mister Lonely flopped massively, Harmony went back to his roots for the quite frankly fucked up, VHS-shot film Trash Humpers, which absolutely does what it says on the tin. It follows a gang of pensioners (really just a bunch of Harmony and his collaborators in masks and outfits) who stalk and intimidate young people, cause mayhem in the town, engage in strange and unpleasant rituals and, well, hump trash. Filming lasted only two weeks, and the resulting film premiered to reviews not unlike those Gummo received. It’s incomprehensible but sort of alluring; its own little messed up Korine masterwork.
The deep cut is… The Diary of Anne Frank Pt. II (1998)
Dubbed ”a welcome pain in the arse” and “insidious” by Frieze, this seldom seen Harmony work is a gallery installation rather than a film, consisting, in part, of the offal of Gummo. On three simultaneously-playing screens, clips conveying various Korine-esque characters appear: a depressed old man dancing to “My Bonnie (Lies Over The Ocean)”; death metal fans spewing on the bible; young men simulating masturbation. Combined, none of these images make much sense, and most of it — titled included — seems designed to shock and upset us. But that is the key motivation in Harmony Korine’s work, a director who’s spent nearly three decades doing what many others are not brave or insane enough to do.