Background
Harmony Korine was born on 4 January1974 in Bolinas, California, United States.
Harmony Korine was born on 4 January1974 in Bolinas, California, United States.
Harmony Korine had bis first credit doing the script for Kids (95, Larry Clark). Some asked whether that drab, comatose scrutiny of grim life had or needed a script. But a script is not just a collection of pages. It can be an attitude to life, an element in casting, and an influence on the way of filming. Thus, Giumiio came as no surprise (no matter how shocking or disturbing you might find it).
Jttlien Donkey-Boy is a very different kind of film—it lias a plot and a looming psychic drama behind it. But it is made in a similar way, and it shows Korine developing.
Sight and Sound noted a dilemma: Bertolucci had called Gnnimo the one revolutionary film of the late twentieth century, whereas Janet Maslin of the New York Times had said it might be the worst ever made. Sight and Sound was seeking resolution, but it seems to me truer to Korine and the real cause of minimalism that a film might be both—for what we re on the edge of here is an explosive end to cinema, as a way of remaking its soeietv.
There’s no wonder at the appeal of minimalism in an age of budgets over $100 million, of astonishing special effects and a widening gap between the harsh realities in which most people exist and the daft fantasies they are supposed to aspire to. But minimalism can grow out of political anger, a critique of capitalism, stylistic austerity, or a kind of numb, pretentious helplessness that sees the irony in a copy of Vogue floating on the toxic surface of a full latrine. A genuine political dismay would be best advised to get into politics, to change things that way. But then the aesthetic response—the urge, say, to make Dogme-like films, or simply to record the passing of unending human disaster— can seem cold and exploitative.
That said, minimalism can be a desperate attempt to hold on to real place, real time, and nature in the broadest sense against the infernal electronic possibilities for change. There is a great need for movies, or for film, that simply record real life and asks us to attend.
There are astonishing beauties in distance and duration, as Renoir, Mizoguchi, Dreyer, and so mam great masters believed.