New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film Volume 3 Number 2 © 2005 Intellect Ltd

Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ncin.3.2.115/1

‘Seeing or believing’: Harmony Korineand the cinema of self-destructionDuncan White Kingston University

AbstractThe films of writer and director, Harmony Korine (Gummo (1997) and JulienDonkey-Boy (1999)), are considered in terms of the cultural positioning ofAmerican ‘independent film making’. The article is critical of overemphasizedassociations with the work of Larry Clark and offers an in-depth account ofKorine’s Eurocentric and highly stylized response to avant-garde film-makingprocesses. The article develops a critical account of Korine’s various techniquesidentified as a new form of realism that challenges the traditional notions of polit-ical and cultural identities inherent to considerations of American ‘place’.Artaudian surrealism, still-life painting and Dogme 95 inform the treatment ofKorine’s endeavour to unearth hidden and imaginary landscapes resistant to gen-eralized themes of location and orientation in American film-making.

‘The fantastic doesn’t exist; everything is real.’(André Breton)

This article will attempt to demonstrate the peculiar nature and signifi-cance of the cinematic departure constituted by the films Gummo (1997)and Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) both written and directed by HarmonyKorine. While Korine’s position within the New York tradition of indepen-dent film-making has become increasingly established it is vital that thereshould be some critical account of how Surrealism, European naturalismand the post-war tradition of cinéma-verité are brought to bear in hiswork.1 This article will interrogate how and to what extent films such asGummo and Julien Donkey-Boy destabilize current assumptions about cine-matic materiality and narrative as well as aural and visual subjectivity. Inlooking closely at Korine’s involvement in Lars Von Trier’s ‘Dogme 95manifesto’ and his collaboration in the making of Larry Clark’s film, Kids(1995), this article intends to position the films of Harmony Korine interms of a critical counter-current in American film-making, one thatchallenges the cultural orthodoxy of Hollywood but also reactivates thevital beauty and unpredictability of cinema.

The verité-style is perhaps the most provocative element of Korine’s cin-ematic practice, and Korine makes it clear that the films of John Cassaveteshad a profound impact on his approach.2 Like Cassavetes, Korine has beeninclined to cast friends, non-professional actors, relatives and himself asperformers in his films. Most importantly of all, Korine has embraced the

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1 See Robert Sklar, ‘TheCase of HarmonyKorine’, in Jon Lewis(ed.), The End ofCinema as We Know It(New York: New YorkUniversity Press,2001): ‘Gummo wasthe most reviled filmever associated withthe post-1990Americanindependent filmmovement,’ p. 261.

2 See Geoffrey Macnab’sinterview withKorine, ‘MoonshineMaverick’, collected inJim Hillier (ed.),American IndependentCinema: A Sight andSound Reader (London:BFI, 2001),pp. 194–99.

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KeywordsHarmony Korinerepresentationplacevisualitysubjectivity

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‘direct’ cinema or documentary-like techniques that had such an effect onCassavetes because of the way in which they problematize the distinctionbetween fiction and reality in film. The new documentary film-makerssuch as Shirley Clarke operating in New York after the Second World Warand in the wake of Italian neo-realism, had discovered new and vital waysto interrogate and record the changing aspects of modern reality.3

However, for Cassavetes and the advocates of cinéma-verité, the mostprovocative of the advances made in the field of documentary-making wasnot the idealistic recording of ‘truth’, but the cinematic insight into howeveryday life was being performed. This became the defining principle ofCassavetes’s approach to fictional film-making: rather than being pre-sented by or acted out before the camera, a reality is produced through thevery procedure of its enquiry.

Larry Clark, who collaborated with Korine on the filming of Kids, wasalso heavily influenced by the verité tradition. In Kids, Clark employs a doc-umentary style that attempts to present the viewer with apparently ‘real-life’ evidence from the murky scenes of modern American childhood. At theage of twenty, Harmony Korine had written the script some time beforebeing introduced to Clark in 1994.4 Kids is a graphic portrayal of urbanteenage existence defined by alcohol, drug use, under-age sex and HIV.Casper and Telly (the ‘virgin-surgeon’) are two teenage boys that navigatethe humid streets of Manhattan as Jen, a previous conquest of Telly’s, dis-covers she is HIV positive. She struggles to catch up with Telly before heputs himself and other teenagers in further jeopardy. The film’s documen-tary-like style develops a strategy that suggests an intimate knowledge of aspecific subculture, its tendencies, values and codes of expression emphasiz-ing the proximity but also the paradoxical unavailability of its subject.Indeed, according to the film historian Erik Barnouw this is in many waysa vital aspect of the documentary film: ‘its ability to open our eyes to worldsavailable to us, but for one reason or another are not perceived.’5 However,as this article will suggest, Clark’s attempt to create a resonant impression,or portrait of urban childhood falls into the trap of confusing the documen-tary viewer’s expectations of identification and consolidation with a notionof ‘childhood’ that traditionally appeals to a Peter Pan-like desire for return.

In his directorial debut Korine, as this article will demonstrate, puts aconsiderable distance between himself and the topography of Clark’s Kids.If the potency of Clark’s fictional presentation of childhood is (or is not) inmaking one place available to another, Korine attempts in Gummo to reor-ganize childhood narratives into a collage of unavailable displacement.More literally, it is relocated to Xenia, Ohio: famous for the tornado thatdestroyed half the town in April 1974 killing 33 people there:

Xenia, Ohio. Xenia, Ohio. A few years ago a tornado hit this place. It killedthe people left and right. Dogs died. Cats died. Houses were split open andyou could see necklaces hanging from branches of trees. People’s legs andneck bones were stickin’ out. Oliver found a leg on his roof. A lot of people’sfathers died and were killed by the great tornado. I saw a girl flying throughthe sky and I looked up her skirt. The school was smashed and some kidsdied. My neighbour was killed in half. He used to ride dirt bikes and his

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3 Shirley Clarke, LionelRogosin and MorrisEngel aredocumentary-makerswho used scripts,rehearsals andrepeatedimprovisation. All hada profound influenceon Cassavetes. Itshould be noted thatCassavetes nevertermed his own workcinéma-verité. SeeRaymond Carney,American Dreaming:The Films Of JohnCassavetes and theAmerican Experience(Los Angeles:University ofCalifornia Press,1985), pp. 28–30.

4 See Peter Biskind,Down and DirtyPictures: Miramax,Sundance and the Riseof Independent Film(London: Bloomsbury,2004), pp. 200–15for an overview of therelationship in termsof the film’sproduction and thecommercialdevelopment ofMiramax.

5 Erik Barnouw,Documentary: AHistory of the Non-Fiction Film (Oxford:Oxford UniversityPress, 1983), p. 3.

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three-wheelers. They never found his head. I always thought that was funny.People died in Xenia. Before dad died he got a bad case of the diabetes.

This is the voice-over that prefaces Gummo. Told by Solomon (who ‘lookslike no other boy in the world ... He almost looks like a cartoon character.When you look at him, it’s hard to believe that he’s a real person’6) inhushed tones over a liquid frenzy of images. A sequence of stock or librarypictures, first-hand footage of tornadoes, as well as hand-held footage shoton location by Korine himself, introduces a place where the fictitious andthe actual bleed into their pre-existing distinctions. Gummo’s cast is largelymade up of locals and semi-professional actors. Scenarios, dialogues andframing all appear, to some degree found. An atmosphere of forebodingbanality is layered into the landscape through elliptical interviews andpassing conversation. Stories bubble to the surface anecdotally, as if by acci-dent, so that the background constantly intrudes on any foreground mate-rial. Specific activities and behaviour suggesting relationships among themain characters are in this way consistently impeded upon within a tex-tured ‘reality’. However, ‘despite ... the verité-style camera work, [Korine] isnot making a neo-realist drama-documentary about the plight of the urbanpoor in the Midwest. The title itself suggests that the writer-director is notentirely in earnest: Gummo was the little-known Marx brother.’7 Moreover,the film is not in fact shot on location in Xenia, Ohio but the run-downsuburbs of Nashville, Tennessee where Korine once lived.8

What then is Xenia? A collection of dreams, visions, voices, interviews,anecdotes, rumours, sound effects, jokes, boredoms, eccentricities, songs?Gummo is certainly ‘scripted’, ‘acted’ and ‘set’ in the conventional sense,but the camera responds with an ambivalent awareness suggesting ananxious distance from itself as a tool for fiction-making. Tummler, anotherteenager who partners Solomon as the film’s ‘central protagonists’, giveshis hysterical teeth-chattering rendition of a Marx-brothers skit almost inmock appeal to the invention of Xenia, jiving:

It’s murderous what’s going on with people today. One fellow comes up tome on the street right here in Xenia and says he hasn’t eaten in three days. Isay, ‘Force yourself !’ Another guy comes up and says he hasn’t eaten in aweek. I say, ‘Don’t worry, it tastes the same.’

Tummler’s performance betrays the influential presence of the camera. Asin the Cassavetes dramas or the ‘documentary’ films of Shirley Clarke thatrespond to Italian neo-realism, there is an acknowledgement that charac-ters do not present themselves; they perform themselves.9 Xenia, unlikethe New York youth subculture as is suggested in Kids, is not true beforethe film; Xenia is true in the film.

It is probably unfair to describe Tummler and Solomon as the film’s‘central protagonists’. If Xenia is the depiction of childhood as a landscapeof displaced unavailability, then the centre-ground, traditionally occupiedby the fears, doubts, wishes and desires of characterization, is to someextent emptied out. Those looking for a discernible plot or storyline inGummo, however, might point to Tummler and Solomon. Both appear out

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6 See Harmony Korine,Collected Screenplays 1(London: Faber andFaber, 2002), p. 78.The script for Kidsremains suggestivelyuncollected.

7 Geoffrey Macnab,‘MoonshineMaverick’, p. 194.

8 See Robert Sklar, ‘TheCase of HarmonyKorine’, p. 265.

9 See Sylvie Pierre andJean-Louis Comolli,‘Two Faces of Faces’,in John Hillier (ed.),Cahiers du Cinema1960–1968: NewWave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood(London: Routledge,1986). Comolliwrites: ‘Certainly,there is nothing wesee on the screenwhich has not alsohappened in “reallife”, but “in real life”,in this case, means infront of the cameraand through the cam-era. Cassavetes andhis friends do not usethe cinema as a wayof reproducingactions, gestures,faces or ideas, but asa way of producingthem.’ (Originalemphasis) p. 326.

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of the ordinary, Solomon’s cartoon status has already been noted whileTummler is cast as ‘part-trash, part-Bible’, and they receive the lion’sshare of scripted dialogue. We follow them as they set about killing straycats in the neighbourhood, selling the carcasses to unspecified buyers (aChinese restaurant is mentioned) and buying glue with the proceeds. Wefollow the two boys as we follow Casper and Telly in Kids, only in Gummothe camera’s ‘pursuit’ is interrupted by the type of fractured landscapingnoted above so that the general movement becomes more of an episodicblur. They are further removed from Clark’s characterization in their lackof purpose and urgency. When they come upon Jarrod, a would-be com-petitor also killing and selling cats, they are more interested in Jarrod’scatatonic grandmother whom he has to look after. Later in the film,Tummler and Solomon break into Jarrod’s dingy house and turn off hisgrandmother’s life-support machine. Aside from wearing matching DollyParton masks, the teenagers are unceremonial in their duties. Solomonclaims that she smells liked ‘baked ham’. Tummler flicks the switch notingas he strokes her hair, ‘She’s always been dead. She’s been gone for awhile.’ The continuity is more of an accident than it is confrontational andunderlines the ambivalent attitude towards the access and availability sug-gested in the camera style. The jumps and cuts of Xenia’s displacement lit-erally break up the interiority of characters such as these; what remains istheir peculiar behaviour and the few words they say, as if, like the dormantgrandmother, there is no interior to occupy. This is where the documen-tary genre is signalled most critically. The camera acts as a mirror where,on the one hand, a certain reality is reflected while on the other, Tummlerand Solomon, gazing back at themselves, act out the role of reluctantinsiders.

This mirroring signals a telling distinction between the two films, Kidsand Gummo. The ‘truth’ of Clark’s directorial position is perhaps lost in theheavy narrative organization, while Korine’s sense of displacement inmany ways echoes a Brechtian attitude in his mirroring of the ‘real’.10

During a vital scene in Kids, as Jen is moving through Manhattan hopingto catch up with Telly and inform him of his HIV status, the cameralingers on her reflection in the taxicab’s rear-view mirror. In Gummo, the14-year-old Solomon performs a straight-faced dance and weight routineto Madonna’s ‘Like A Prayer’ before a wall-sized mirror in the basement ofhis mother’s cluttered and disorderly house. In Kids, Jen’s reflection acts asa central point of narrative organization. Amid the high-contrast warts-and-all presentation of teenage despondency her reflection represents thebeautiful image of recognizable stardom (Chloe Sevigny). On the otherhand in Gummo, where Sevigny also appears, Hollywood is personified as adisruption. In an earlier scene, Sevigny’s cool brand of celebrity chic isironized as bedroom fetish or fantasy. One critic correctly associates her‘narcissism, knowing sexiness and gazing into the camera’ with the filmsof Andy Warhol, where the persona and performance of ‘stardom’ deter-mine the camera’s mimetic preoccupations.11 Similarly as Solomon per-forms for the mirror, Linda Manz appears, amid a cast of largelynon-professional actors as Solomon’s mother. There is an awkwardnessbefore their reflection as he refuses to smile even as she (jokingly) holds a

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10 See Brecht’s‘alienation-effect’: ‘Amasterly use ofgesture can be seen inChinese acting. TheChinese actorachieves the A-effectby being seen toobserve his ownmovements.’ BertoldBrecht, ‘ShortDescription of a newtechnique in actingwhich produces analienation effect’,quoted in MichaelHuxley and NoelWitts (eds), TheTwentieth CenturyPerformance Reader(London: Routledge,1996), p. 102.

11 Michael O’Pray, ‘TheBig Wig’, in JimHillier (ed.), AmericanIndependent Cinema, ASight and Sound Reader(London: BFIPublishing, 2001),p. 22.

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toy gun to his head. Her familiarity coupled with Madonna’s star statustrigger another pattern of recognition for the viewer (or listener) thatrenders the mother as estranged and out of place as the boy’s behaviour.Framed in such a way, the mirror deregulates the organizational relation-ship of camera, performance and audience parodying the ‘truth’ or‘reality’ of the verité-style camera work. Instead of moving in, as with theinternal life awarded Jen’s character, we move further away. It is theunreal that is privileged in the mirror’s reflection, not the ‘real’ con-structed as Jen’s movement toward her end.

This ending is the traditional metanarrative of growing into theauthoritative position of adulthood alluded to in the final moments ofKids.12 The final role of the documentary camera is to record a nakedboy’s confused appeal to the viewer. Surrounded by the near-corporealfallout of an August day and night in Manhattan, and having recentlyraped Jen’s comatose form, Casper in apparent and sudden shock demandsof the camera, ‘What happened?’ This direct appeal has the effect ofawarding the viewer with an authoritative ability to look back, to look intoand possess, and is reminiscent of the traditional narrative scheme ofchildhood texts. The work of Jacqueline Rose, for instance, challenges theposition of continuity resonant in

the idea of a primitive or lost state to which the child has special access.The child is ... something of a pioneer who restores these worlds to us, andgives them back with a facility or directness which ensures that our ownrelationship to them is, finally, safe.13

Although Korine’s camera also alludes to the documentary he is able toblur the boundaries Clark only manages to reinforce in failing to jeopar-dize the authoritative position of his audience.

Clark’s documentary style now seems misdirected when considered interms of the aggressive narrative organization within which it is framed.bell hooks, in an early review of the film, sets out a critical context inwhich she defines the hegemonic code of white heterosexual aspirationsmotivating Clark’s characterizations.14 While this criticism may be tosome extent unfair, it should point to underlying problems with the use ofdocumentary techniques. Coherence through beauty becomes a form oforganization and control. Clark’s looking glass, although superficially sub-versive, is a totalizing moment of Hollywood realism - its self-imposed cer-tainty restoring the position of an audience that understands how theconstruction of something desired produces an orbit of coherence andcontrol. The mirror reflects the aggressive internalizing strategy at thecentre of Clark’s narrative:

When you’re young not much matters. When you find something that youcare about, then that’s all you got. When you go to sleep at night you dreamof pussy. When you wake up it’s the same thing, it’s there in your face, youcan’t escape it. Sometimes when you’re young the only place to go is inside.That’s just it, fucking is what I love. Take that away from me then I’ve reallygot nothing.

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12 See Freud: ‘When anadult recalls his child-hood it seems to himto have been a happytime, in which oneenjoyed the momentand looked to thefuture without anywishes; it is for thisreason that he envieschildren. But ... itseems childhood isnot the blissful idyllinto which we distortit into retrospect, andthat, on the contrary,children are goadedon through the yearsof childhood by theone wish to get bigand do what grown-ups do. This wish isthe motive of all theirgames.’ ‘Leonardo DaVinci and a Memoryof his Childhood’, inThe Penguin FreudLibrary Vol. 14: Artand Literature(London: Penguin,1990), pp. 219–20.

13 Jacqueline Rose, TheCase of Peter Pan or theImpossibility ofChildren’s Fiction(London: Macmillan,1984), p. 9.

14 See bell hooks, ‘WhiteLight’, Sight andSound, 6: 5 (May,1996). ‘It becomesevident that this is anarrative about theorganization of whiteteenage male desirearound phallic power.The power todominate andpenetrate.’ p. 12.

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Telly’s desire for penetration and control might be seen as a manifestationof the system of expectation promoted in the myth of documentary avail-ability and exchange; inside and outside are exchangeable positions theviewer can enjoy and openly inhabit.

In many ways, the project of cinéma-verité, as opposed to documentary,was one that challenged the moral and psychological autonomy of charac-ters established by the filmic process of individual identification with theviewer. The interdependence of characters, situations and determiningforces is communicated by each of them being ‘placed’ together within theunpredictable reality of a living context. Thus, in order to locate Korine’swork properly it is important that we distinguish between the two represen-tational landscapes of Xenia and New York. Xenia’s apparent unreality is farmore pervasive and yet its realism, the sense in which it resonates with thelives it represents, registers at a variety of levels when compared to thatof Clark’s New York. By way of further definition, ‘Xenia’, according toNorman Bryson, are a pre-genre decorative form of Roman still-life paint-ings and mark an unlikely parallel with the shifting sense of interioritydeveloped by Korine.15 The history of still-life painting, according to Bryson,begins within the closed walls of Rome where Xenia were painted as a kindof wallpaper. He turns to the Greek sophist, Philostratus, who taught inAthens and later in Rome in the third century AD for scarce evidencedepicting the existence of such phenomena. The evidence is written; con-tained in the sophist’s work the Imagines, and consist of highly detaileddescriptions of the paintings. ‘The Xenia essentially come to us as a ruin.’16

Bryson demonstrates that what is important about the depictions of the lostXenia, and as such is the most important aspect of still-life painting gener-ally, is not the depiction of objects, but in fact the description of sight. ‘Whatthe Imagines ... describe are codes of viewing in a remarkably pure form:protocols, expectations and generic rules governing the viewing of pictures... Philostratus is educating his readers in the properties of viewing.’17 Thestill life has always been an attempt to directly copy, or represent evidence ofhuman activity. Bowls of fruit, furniture, tools, the elements of interior lives,the rooms that people inhabit (though absent from the scenes themselves),all commonly figure in each single rendition organized around the basicmaterials of everyday life. Thus for Philostratus, Xenia are spaces. Moreover,they are spaces to be read. Lives are left behind in them and he takes greatcare to examine the kinds of lives they were. Xenia represent interiorswithin interiors and the closer they are to the reality depicted within, thegreater the degree of fiction.18 When able to move inside, it remains unclearexactly where the viewer might be; he or she may still be outside.19

The Xenia of Gummo allows Korine to stage similar problems and pro-cedures of seeing. Many of the scenes, including the grandmother’sbedroom, are framed in the way of still-life paintings and begin their move-ment in this way from the real, the streets, the front lawns, the yards to theirreality (as dialogues, action, scenarios) of fiction. Material of the everydayclutters each of the interior spaces. Rooms are flooded with unwantedobjects, the disused and ephemeral seem to pile around the characters sothat they stumble and navigate, rather than pass through each room. Themateriality, in its very abundance however, distorts the organizational

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15 See Norman Bryson,Looking at theOverlooked: FourEssays on Still LifePainting (London:Reaktin Books, 1990).

16 ibid., p. 5.

17 ibid., pp. 20–21.

18 Bryson notes ‘theelaborate changes ofontological register asimages pass throughdifferent levels ordegrees of reality,away from a primor-dially given real andtowards anincreasingly sophisti-cated set of fictionswithin fictions.’ p. 36.

19 Moving from wall towall, the Xenia in aroom would becomeincreasinglycomplicated as thedetail in theirimitation sharpened.Often the paintingswould mimic a viewfrom the windows ina room bringingplush gardens insideas if the walls weretransparent. In thisway, ‘representationabsorbs the house.’See Bryson, ibid.,p. 36.

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aspect involved in the lives that a still-life image may narrate. The informa-tion that a precise array of objects might normally signal is literally lost invisual noise. Korine may or may not be aware of the Xenia connection, buthe is certainly conscious of the reading involved where images are mostopenly cast as space. A viewing relationship is established as the suppos-edly real (or that which might be considered ‘actual’ as in the verité realisttradition) ‘is invaded by a principle of ... fiction.’20 The audience is activewithin such a space, in the same manner as the characters; but instead ofbeing coordinated through and around ‘properties of viewing’ or ‘codes ofrecognition’, both appear lost in the clutter of signs. The viewer is involvedwith the very materiality of cinema, ‘a polyphonic, layered reality’.21

Seeing and hearing through noise is evidently a crucial aspect ofKorine’s film-making. Kids, by way of contrast, where our attention is rarelydrawn from the progress of its central characters and where interruption israrely more than a not unfamiliar and generally brief postponement ininevitability, is far less noisy and therefore easier to read than a film likeGummo. The cutting-up of footage and the juxtapositions of seeminglyrandom voice-overs are distorted further as they mingle within a sound-track gravitating between death-metal and birdsong. When the visual stim-ulus is reduced to the seeming simplicity of Tummler and Solomon ridingdown hill on their bicycles, the scene is accompanied by the blaring rumbleand fuzz of Nifelheim’s track, ‘Hellish Blasphemy’. Although apparentlyrandom, Gummo is littered with a series of quips and musical motifs (suchas a repetitive and tuneless accordion) that thread their way through thedisparate accumulation of noise. Is this what Xenia sounds like? Are thesethe sounds that Xenia makes? It is as if we are confronted with a peculiarkind of dissonance produced when the real and the unreal collide and rubtogether. Tactically, the audience must now pick out voices from in amongstthe local noise. A method of abstraction, as Douglas Kahn points out,

noise can be understood in one sense to be that constant grating sound gener-ated by the movement between the abstract and the empirical ... The process ofabstraction itself, what is lost, is thereby involved in the diminution of noise.22

The awkward and often quirky (obviously scripted) dialogue, again remi-niscent of the characterization in John Cassavetes’s films, carries within itan unfamiliar form of sensitivity. Voice becomes a strange mode of orienta-tion within Xenia’s sensory field of noise. The characters speak out of anempirical process, characterized as the part-invention of Xenia.

This processing of noise suggests an affinity with Surrealist cinema. AsKahn goes on to point out: ‘The interpolation of noise was a means bywhich meaning could be generated from abstraction and thus corre-sponded directly to Surrealism’s larger project of bringing realms of realityhither to guarded or unknown into mimetic practice.’23 Under the heading‘Seeing or Believing’ and among the jumble of images, jokes, dialoguesand rumours that form his ‘novel’ A Crackup at the Race Riots, Korinescrawled into the text: ‘There can be no film without love, love of somekind. There can be novels without love, other works of art without love,but there can be no cinema without love.’24

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20 ibid., p. 23.

21 See RaymondCarney’s discussion ofdevelopments in cam-era and soundtechnology indocumentary film-making, in AmericanDreaming: The Films ofJohn Cassavetes and theAmerican Experience,(London: University ofCalifornia Press,1985) pp. 29–30.Also Jean-AndréFieschi, ‘Slippages ofFiction’, in MarkEaton (ed.),Anthropology - Reality- Cinema: The Films OfJean Rouche (London:BFI, 1979), for a dis-cussion of cinematicmateriality.

22 Douglas Kahn, Noise,Water, Meat: A Historyof Sound in the Arts(Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 1999), p. 25.

23 Kahn, ibid., p. 32.

24 Harmony Korine, ACrackup at the RaceRiots (London: Faberand Faber, 1999)p. 29.

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It almost directly echoes the sentiments of André Breton:

What is most specific of all the means of the camera is obviously the power tomake concrete the forces of love which, despite everything, remain deficientin books, simply because nothing in them can render the seduction or dis-tress of a glance or certain feelings of priceless giddiness.25

In having their gaze returned, cinema was important to the Surrealistsbecause love and its ‘priceless giddiness’, existed in the feeling of sight. Lovein the Surrealist sense, and I would suggest in the sense that Korine ishinting at, resonates in the process of abstraction described by Kahn andthroughout the interiors of Bryson’s ‘Xenia’. The real exists in its abstrac-tion, in its diminution, in how it is perceived. The sense of an object’s realityexists in this relationship and nowhere else. It suggests that Korine is inter-ested in a certain kind of realism, born from a Surrealist attitude, wherebythe noise of his Xenia, his moving still-life, can only be brought to bear onitself if it is to reappear in representation. ‘Instead of inhibiting communica-tion, where noise exists so too does a greater communication.’26

By way of introduction and in encountering perhaps the most defini-tive example of this cinematic seeing in noise, it is necessary to considerKorine’s second film as writer and director, Julien Donkey-Boy. In one of aseries of still images, a technique also used in Gummo, Julien’s voice isaudible as we find him working in a home for the blind:

JULIEN: Come here, come here, come here. See from here, I can see all theway, I can see all the way across from New York City almost allthe way across to Los Angeles.

BLINDMAN: Oh man! The big time, baby!JULIEN: I can see all the way to the other side of America.BLINDMAN: Whoa!JULIEN: All the way over to the West Coast. I can see right over from the

East Coast to the West Coast.BLINDMAN: Oh man, oh man. Thanks man, for telling me man, damn!

Julien donkey-boy maps the striking circumstances of one family’s life orga-nized around mental illness. Like Gummo it is a film pieced together as akind of cinematic portraiture constructed as the presentation or assem-blage of evidence, rather than the ‘telling’ of a story. Julien is schizo-phrenic, a young man drawn from Korine’s own family life.27 He lives athome with his brother, sister, father and grandmother, his mother havingapparently died some time before. An interior world appears in segmentsand broken sequences as each member of the family goes about his or herdaily business forever in the shadow of their tyrannical and dogmaticfather played by Werner Herzog. Julien’s sister Pearl, played (again) byChloe Sevigny is heavily pregnant, Chris, his younger brother, is traininghard to be a wrestler under the watchful eye of their father, while theirgrandmother (played by Korine’s own grandmother, Joyce Korine) is awandering presence throughout the suburban house. Again there is adocumentary-like register, the sense that the reality of an otherwise

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25 André Breton, ‘As in aWood’, in PaulHammond (ed.), TheShadow and its Shadow(San Francisco: CityLights Books, 2000)p. 74.

26 Kahn, op. cit., p. 26.Kahn makes thisassertion in terms ofhandwriting. Here,unlike in printedscript, a great dealmore than a givencombination of wordsis communicated(Kahn suggests thismight include thewriter’s personality,mood or empirical cir-cumstances).Interestingly, LuisBuñuel, the Surrealistfilm-maker, despisedhis own handwriting,while Korine’s noteon love appears hand-written (presumablyhis own) penned inshaky capitals (see‘Jean Claude CarriereForward to LuisBuñuel’, trans. GarretWhite, An UnspeakableBetrayal: SelectedWritings of LuisBuñuel, (London:University ofCalifornia Press,2000)). Salvador Dalifamously signed hisname in the corner ofnumerous blankpieces of paper as ameans of quelling thenoise and chaos of theblank page. For eachof these artists, noiseis the material ofform.

27 Korine’s uncle suffersfrom the same condi-tion. Ewan Bremnerwho plays the role ofJulien was introducedto and spent timewith him as the filmwas made.

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hidden place is being made available, but here the verité-style is empha-sized by the rules governing the film’s ‘Dogme 95’ status.

Composed by the Danish directors Lars Von Trier (The Idiots (1998))and Thomas Vinterberg (Festen (1998)) the Dogme ‘manifesto’ was anattempt to ‘purify’ film-making of its excess and ‘untruth’. One of the ‘tencommandments’ in that manifesto specifically states that all cameras mustbe hand-held almost demanding that there be the natural intimacy of doc-umentary film-making. Other rules in the Dogme manifesto included theuse of real locations rather than sets, a ban on special effects and props, nosoundtrack could be used other than music produced in the scenes them-selves, no lighting other than natural light or artificial lights found onlocation and everything had to be shot on 35mm or digital cameras. All ofthese variants were already a part of Korine’s aesthetic, but cruciallyemphasized the empirical nature of his film-making and the form ofabstraction it achieved. Both the Dogme ‘brotherhood’ and Korine areconcerned with apprehending some kind of momentary truth by attempt-ing to restore the magical in film. Here again we must emphasize theessential paradox of this type of realism or documentary-like naturalism.The arrangement or coherent organization of a film is achieved notthrough an obvious plot or narrative development but through a type ofreal-life or empirical witnessing (often disturbing, often strange) of what isotherwise unreal if not for its appearance in the visual texture of cinema.

When Julien, who has already demonstrated unpredictable and danger-ous patterns of behaviour, helps a blind man ‘see’ across America, Korineis directly signalling a tradition of the ‘blind’ in avant-garde cinema.Notably there is the case in Werner Herzog’s film Kasper Hauser (1974)where Kasper, a character in many respects similar to Julien, has a visionof a blind guide leading a caravan through the Sahara Desert. ‘A compassis of no help in the Sahara; the blind Berber guide instead finds the way bytasting and smelling the sand.’28 This type of characterization is a circularcomment on seeing and orientation in modern narrative film-making. In‘seeing’ this way, Julien is rereading the real for the blind, but also for theaudience. Beyond the window is the familiar Manhattan skyline, its avail-able proximity is reversed with an effect (not necessarily achieved in Kids)of alienation carried in its imaginary transaction. Like Solomon andTummler, Julien maintains a precarious position within his landscape. Hischaracterization might again suggest centrality, the subject around whicha family portrait is organized, but again the camera work is disruptive,29 itsmirroring capacities mimicking Julien’s peculiar perception of the world inhow it is delivered. (Julien is decentred further by the attention-seekingbehaviour of Herzog’s character.) One further mirror scene demonstratesthe characterization of Julien’s displaced relationship with himself and hisenvironment. Here Julien threatens himself with a rifle:

Stop moving, shut up! Listen, you’re a dead man sonny, don’t ever comeback like in 1980 and you ate like a cancer. You killed the Jews, you killedthe hippies, you killed all the mother’s titties, you killed fucking cancer, youcame back in the 1980s dressed as a sheriff. What’re you doing, what’re youdoing? Answer me, answer me, answer me! ... Hey this is Julien, King Julien.

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28 See Renate Gerulaitis,‘Recurring CulturalPatterns: WernerHerzog’s film EveryMan for Himself andGod Against All, TheEnigma of KasparHauser, in Journal ofPopular Culture, 22: 4(Spring 1989), p. 61.

29 It is worth noting theinfluence ofcinematographerAnthony Dod Mantlewho worked on eachof the Danish Dogmefilms as well as JulienDonkey-Boy.

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How you doing, King Julien? Hey, my good friend, how you doing? Hey, thisis Adolf, Adolf. He ate my mother’s titties.

Like Solomon’s voice-over in Gummo, the script might suggest a confusedinternalization of familial loss. The death of a parent precedes each film.But in moving the critical drama to the outside of each scene Korineinvokes a different form of portrait. Certainly a form distinct from thecodes of viewing that make Clark’s characters so familiar. Phallic agency,heterosexual potency, or self-confirmation instead of orientating the nar-rative, become Julien Donkey-Boy’s broken axis of confusion and disorienta-tion. Incest and abuse haunts any purposive movement, as it becomesslowly apparent that Julien’s sister Pearl is pregnant with his child.

This type of characterization is ‘aiming’ at a reality elliptically ratherthan episodically.

The character becomes a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomesanimated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on allsides, and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules ofa response or an action. He records rather than reacts. He is prey to avision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than engaged in an action.30

Werner Herzog describes his characterization of Kaspar Hauser, basedpartly on historical fact and partly on popular legend, in terms of displace-ment. ‘He is not an outsider: he is the very centre, and all the rest are out-siders.’31 Like Julien, Kaspar Hauser is a centre but he is not a centringagent, or a centralizing character, in the tradition of an orienting hero; he isthe very instability in any such desire for coherence and control. These arethe types of character that almost personify cinema in the way evoked byDeleuze. Having grown to adulthood in a cellar, Kaspar Hauser finds it dif-ficult to make any distinctions between himself and his environment. Andso again there is the noise (‘Don’t you hear that horrible screaming allaround you? That screaming, men call silence?’), a local authority that vio-lently rebukes the bizarre spatial behaviour and bodily disorientation ofKaspar, only to collect in the abstraction of his ‘visions’. Regulating theunregulated - while cultural currency for an audience encountering a filmlike Kids - is instead made manifest in the brutality brought upon Kaspar ashe moves further from innocence (the pastoral imagery that litters Herzog’sportrait) and closer to social inclusion, language, reason, etc. In this sense,reality is a regulation of space, defining all participation in how it is orga-nized, abusing any form or shape of unpredictability Kaspar might assume.

The spatial tendencies of an authoritative camera, when perceived inthis way, must become essentially destructive.

Herzogian realism demands that the texture and matter of the filmproducts themselves bear the same signs of life, namely the signs of aneruption or violence that should visually tear the placid surface that clas-sical cinema usually represents as life itself.32

Antonin Artaud, who like Breton saw beauty in the convulsive, definescinema as ‘the epidermis of reality’ that aims to ‘destroy itself ’ and so com-pletes a neat bridge between Surrealism, Herzogian naturalism and thefilms of Harmony Korine.33 Julien encounters himself in ways reminiscentof Artaud in his notes on cinema, suicide and Van Gogh, that is to say,

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30 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema2: The Time-Image(London: AthlonePress, 1989), p. 3.

31 Herzog quoted inRenate Gerulaitis,‘Recurring CulturalPatterns’, p. 62.

32 Timothy Corrigan,New German Cinema(Bloomington:Indiana UniversityPress, 1993), p. 129.

33 See Antonin Artaud,‘On the Seashell andThe Clergyman(Cinema and Reality)’,in Susan Sontag (ed.),Artaud: SelectedWritings (trans. HelenWeaver) (Los Angeles:University ofCalifornia Press,1988), p. 152.

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with a deep suspicion. ‘Life appears to me merely as consent to the appar-ent legibility of things and their coherence in the mind. I no longer feel likethe irreducible crossroads of things.’34 As Julien inhabits an increasinglymaterial form of seeing, so he is further removed from his own materialform, challenging himself in the mirror, doubting the reflected identity hefinds there. In many ways he becomes an object among objects, so that thesurrounding film (his environment after all), like Bryson’s and thenKorine’s Xenia, is unable to collect in him.

For Roland Barthes this relationship with objects is the only authorityavailable. ‘There are objects wherever you look ... This is man’s space; in ithe measures himself ... There is no other authority in his life but the onehe imprints on the inert by shaping and manipulating it.’35 In JulienDonkey-Boy this ‘imprint’ of authority is jokingly put to one side as Julien’sbrother, Chris (Evan Neumann) practises wrestling a rubbish bin in thestreet outside his house. Chris is bound by a competitive spiral of inade-quacy as his father (Herzog) tries to cultivate the way of a winner in him.

I don’t want all this plastic in my garden. And do you feel like a winner? ...That’s not an opponent. You’ve got to be tougher, real tough. You’ve got toout-gut them, out-tough them, out-wrestle them, out ... plastic them.

The rubbish bin is challenged at the precise moment of having any signifi-cance or metaphoric quality - as emptiness, waste, expulsion - it is evenless: plastic. ‘The price to be paid is that plastic hardly exists as a sub-stance.’36 The representational quality of an object shifts as the subject re-encounters himself. Bryson notes that Xenia are ‘a form of image-making... committed to the deletion or erasure of the depicted object at the exactmoment when depiction takes place.’37 In Gummo, this erased depiction isencountered at its most extreme as men take it in turns to wrestle with akitchen chair. Korine later points out that he was not in the room when thescene was filmed so that it becomes the height of verité-style immediacy andperformance. ‘This idea of a man fighting a chair means very much to me.The outcome is central because what would happen if the chair won?’38

Luis Buñuel saw in the capturing of this type of reality the potential in neo-realism and how Surrealist cinema could go one better, ‘raising the com-monplace act to the level of dramatic action’.39 It is as if the object has tobegin again in the mind of the subject. Barthes’s assertion is that thesubject governs himself in the way he governs the relationship betweenobjects; Julien, however, unmasks this sign system of authority that laysbare the behavioural interdependence of character, audience and film.

As with Julien and the kitchen chair in Gummo, Artaud is deeplyaffected by the visual-noise of Van Gogh’s chair. ‘No one since Van Goghhas known how to move the great cymbal ... the perpetually superhumantone, according to the repressed order with which the objects of real lifering.’40 Artaud’s Surrealist question, here in the phonetic play of symboland cymbal, is essentially representational. Whoever inhabits the groundbetween sign and signified ‘can open their ear’, and perceive the authorityin objects. Out of this we can derive his sense of subjectivity, one shared byJulien and so informing the organization of Korine’s cinema. Julien inhabits

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34 Artaud, ‘On Suicide’,ibid., p. 157.

35 Roland Barthes, ‘TheWorld as Object’,Susan Sontag (ed),Roland Barthes: AReader, (London:Vintage, 1993) p. 64.

36 Barthes, ‘Plastic’, inMythologies, (London:Paladin, 1973) p. 98.

37 Bryson, op. cit., p. 59.

38 Korine interviewed inTod Lippy (ed.),Projections 11: NewYork Film Makers onNew York Film Making(London: Faber andFaber, 2000) p. 269.His comment on thechair reads further:‘What would the manfeel if the seat cushionof the chair got thebetter of him, of if hegot tangled up in itslegs and felt that hisopponent, althoughnot necessarily alive,had been too worthyan adversary? I imag-ine the man’sself-worth woulddiminish if the chairstood there bent andlaughing.’

39 Luis Buñuel, op. cit.,p. 139.

40 Artaud, ‘Van Gogh,The Man Suicided bySociety, in Sontag, op.cit., p. 491.

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41 Artaud, ‘Is Suicide aSolution’, in Sontag,op. cit., p. 171.

42 Artaud, ‘On Suicide’,p. 158.

43 We should makesome distinctionbetween Clark’s stillphotography andKids. This is a readingof cinematicdepartures. Clark’sphotography deservesfar greater depth ofscrutiny than is possi-ble here. See JohnPutz, The Body and theLens (New York: H.N.Abrams, 1995) for arelevant, if somewhatbrief,contextualization ofClark’s photography.

44 See again Comolli’scomments on thework of Cassavetes: ‘Ageneral movement ofthe film [Faces(1968)] is createdwhich gives theimpression of itselfcreating, through itsown means, the indi-vidual movementswhich make it up. It isas if the rhythm of thefilm were self-generat-ing.’ Pierre andComolli, ‘Two Faces ofFaces’, in John Hillier(ed.), op. cit., p. 327.

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this territory of everyday visual noise, but to such an extent that he threat-ens to disappear amid its confusion as the coherence his subjectivity or theempirical authority that his position might provide, breaks down repeat-edly. ‘Slap yourself,’ his father demands. ‘If I was as stupid as you I wouldslap myself. Then I might wake up.’ The surface of the film often ruptureswith fragments of Julien’s self-harm and abuse. He slaps himself, biteshimself and pulls his own hair in fits of an Artaudian scale of self-destruc-tion. ‘We must be terribly doubtful, not only about existence ... but aboutthe inner agitation and deep sensitivity in things, actions and reality.’41

Suicide is not in itself a ‘solution’ for Artaud, but its proximity and the con-sideration of its very availability are the height of representational activity.

Korine sends up the dubious nature of representation in his suicide notes(included in A Crackup at the Race Riots) where the final written words ofsons and daughters map fictional accounts of supposedly fictional deaths.Suicide and representational mortality (perhaps the flip-side of Artaud’sparanoia) surface again in A Crackup at the Race Riots where Tupac Shakur(the now dead gangster-rapper) lists his top ten favourite novels; ‘AntoninArtaud: Van Gogh: Suicide Through Society’ comes in at number one. Self-destructive tendencies figure elsewhere in Harmony Korine’s career. Oneinfamous video project neatly titled Fight-Harm is made up of footage ofKorine himself picking fights and subsequently being beaten up, often hos-pitalized. In attempting to apprehend a sphere of actuality outside of its(natural) jurisdiction of authority and control, Julien’s self-harm could beseen as symptomatic of a cinematic practice attempting to get around thebarriers of representation and any subsequent depiction of ‘real life’. It couldbe thought of as a form of realism, again reminiscent of Cassavetes’s preoc-cupation with cinematic procedure and process, a way of seeing throughthe feeling of sight and so unveiling ‘the repressed order with which theobjects of real life ring’. We might then ask whether Julien is performingschizophrenia or is schizophrenia simply the nature of performance? Julien,more than a protagonist or a participant or a centralizing character por-trait, acts as a self-destructive register for ‘the resonant reality of things’.42

This sense of cinematic self-destruction develops a critical context ofmaterial embodiment. As in Kids, a film that should be exposed for its tra-ditional undercurrents of coherence and control, the body is generally thesite of accumulation and self-possession; a texture in which reality is orga-nized or given form. The inflicted wound, penetration for Telly and Casper,gathers in the body as a form of selfhood and narrative desire. Clark’scharacterizations are driven by a need to possess and so accumulate.43

Those of Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy are on the other hand inclined toself-destruction and the displacement of desire. Tummler and Solomonmove through Xenia to the same extent that Xenia moves through them;self-generating and self-creating within the process of Korine’s cinemathey are not presenting Xenia, they are the site of its production.44 Julien’sbody is defined by a destructive tendency to self-harm (the wounds heinflicts on himself), but he also displays tenderness and sensitivity; he giveshis eyes to the blind, as the film literally moves through him. The organi-zation of reality is relinquished along with the camera’s authority. If Julieninhabits a material form of seeing and so is further removed from his own

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material form, the viewer must negotiate a cinematic surface that, ratherthan residing in full possession of meaning, acts as a passage for noise,miscommunication, confusion and beauty. This is what is signified in self-destruction. Julien empties out, shifts, gives way, all in order to producenew patterns of mirroring vision.

Works citedArtaud, Antonin (1988a), ‘Is Suicide a Solution’, in Susan Sontag (ed.), Artaud:

Selected Writings (trans. Helen Weaver), Los Angeles: University of California Press.

——- (1988b), ‘On Suicide’, in Susan Sontag (ed.), Artaud: Selected Writings (trans.Helen Weaver), Los Angeles: University of California Press.

——- (1988c), ‘On the Seashell and The Clergyman (Cinema and Reality)’, inSusan Sontag (ed.), Artaud: Selected Writings (trans. Helen Weaver), Los Angeles:University of California Press.

——- (1988d), ‘Van Gogh, The Man Suicided by Society’, in Susan Sontag (ed.),Artaud: Selected Writings (trans. Helen Weaver), Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, p. 491.

Barnouw, Erik (1983), Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Barthes, Roland (1973), Mythologies (trans. Annette Lavers), London: Paladin.

Biskind, Peter (2004), Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise ofIndependent Film, London: Bloomsbury.

Brecht, Bertold (1996), ‘Short Description of a new technique in acting which pro-duces an alienation effect,’ in Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (eds), TheTwentieth Century Performance Reader, London: Routledge.

Breton, André (2000), The Shadow and its Shadow (ed. Paul Hammond), SanFrancisco: City Lights Books.

Bryson, Norman (1990), Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting,London: Reaktin Books.

Buñuel, Luis (2000), An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel (trans.Garret White), London: University of California Press.

Carney, Raymond (1985), American Dreaming: The Films Of John Cassavetes and theAmerican Experience, Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Corrigan, Timothy (1993), New German Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress.

Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, London: Athlone Press.

Eaton, Mark (ed.) (1979), Anthropology - Reality - Cinema: The Films Of Jean Rouche,London: BFI Publishing.

Fieschi, Jean-André (1979), ‘Slippages of Fiction’, in Mark Eaton (ed.), Anthropology- Reality - Cinema: The Films Of Jean Rouche, London: BFI Publishing.

Freud, Sigmund (1990), ‘Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’, inAlbert Dickson (ed.), The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14: Art and Literature,London: Penguin.

Gerulaitis, Renate (1989), ‘Recurring Cultural Patterns: Werner Herzog’s filmEvery Man for Himself and God Against All, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’, inJournal of Popular Culture, 22: 4 (Spring).

Gummo (1997), directed by Harmony Korine, United States: Entertainment/FineLine (Film: 35mm).

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Hillier, Jim (ed.) (2001), American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader,London: BFI Publishing.

Hillier, John (ed.) (1986), Cahiers du Cinema 1960–1968: New Wave, New Cinema,Re-evaluating Hollywood, London: Routledge.

hooks, bell (1996), ‘White Light’, Sight and Sound, 6: 5 (May).

Huxley, Michael and Witts, Noel (eds) (1996), The Twentieth Century PerformanceReader, London: Routledge.

Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), directed by Harmony Korine, United States: Fine Line/Independent Pictures (Film: 35mm).

Kahn, Douglas (1999), Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.

Kids (1995), directed by Larry Clark, United States: Electric/Shining Excalibur/Independent/The Guys Upstairs (Film: 35mm).

Korine, Harmony (1999), A Crackup at the Race Riots, London: Faber and Faber.

——- (2002), Collected Screenplays 1, London: Faber and Faber.

Lewis, Jon (2001), The End of Cinema as We Know It, New York: New York UniversityPress.

Lippy, Tod (ed.) (2000), Projections 11: New York Film Makers on New York FilmMaking, London: Faber and Faber.

O’Pray, Michael (2001), ‘The Big Wig’, in Jim Hillier (ed.), American IndependentCinema: A Sight and Sound Reader, London: BFI Publishing.

Pierre, Sylvie and Comolli, Jean-Louis (1986), ‘Two Faces of Faces’, in John Hillier(ed.), Cahiers du Cinema 1960–1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluatingHollywood, London: Routledge.

Putz, John (1995), The Body and the Lens, New York: H.N. Abrams.

Rose, Jacqueline (1984), The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction,London: Macmillan.

Sklar, Robert (2001), ‘The Case of Harmony Korine’, in Jon Lewis (ed.), The End ofCinema as We Know It, New York: New York University Press.

Sontag, Susan (ed.) (1993), Roland Barthes: A Reader, London: Vintage.

Sontag, Susan (ed.) (1988), Artaud: Selected Writings (trans. Helen Weaver), LosAngeles: University of California Press.

Suggested citation:White, D. (2005), ‘“Seeing or believing”: Harmony Korine and the cinema of self-

destruction’, New Cinemas 3: 2, pp. 115–128, doi: 10.1386/ncin.3.2.115/1

Contributor detailsDuncan White is currently completing a Ph.D. at Kingston University entitled‘America as Nowhere: Place and Placelessness in Contemporary American Literatureand Art’. His work examines various ways in which American ‘place’ is constructedthrough related forms of multidisciplinary media. Contact: Kingston University,River House, 53–57 High Street, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 1LQ.Email: k0319550@kingston.ac.uk

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