More significant to the purposes of this list, he’s released a number of short films that are often as original and transformative as his better-known work in features. Though Korine has made only four feature films since Gummo, he has been anything but idle: he has co-penned lyrics with Cat Power and Bjork, directed a number of music videos, and had his art featured in prestigious galleries. His films approach the disabled and the dispossessed, the racialized and the societally-rejected, in a way that may offend the self-professed allies of these groups, but where Hollywood advocacy films tend to patronize these people by way of saccharine, feel-good stories, Korine simply let’s them exist on screen. And yet his films possess staying power not for their unique vision, not for their shock value, but rather for their immense humanism. But soon after his 1997 debut directorial effort Gummo, no less a figure than Werner Herzog called him, “the last foot soldier in the army,” and since then Korine has produced a body of work that seems to exist entirely outside the confines of contemporary cinematic language. Detractors account for his success by referring to an experimental visual style and subjects that tend to be, as Variety called the Humpers, “riveting beyond rationality.”Īt the beginning of his career he reinforced the enfant terrible stereotype with goofy appearances on Letterman and erratic public behaviour that came as a result of drug addiction.
Too often Harmony Korine is dismissed as a mere provocateur, the dubious character behind films like Gummo and Trash Humpers that are aesthetically, well, trashy.
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