Gummo

Screening on Film

Directed by Harmony Korine.
With Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton, Jacob Sewell.
US, 1997, 35mm, color, 88 min.

In his debut feature, Korine populates a dystopic heartland with amateur actors and shoots them in a gritty cinéma-vérité style that gives the work the feel of a documentary, although it is actually scripted and acted. Gummo is set in the real-life, deadbeat town of Xenia, Ohio, portrayed by Korine as a roach-infested, garbage-strewn hellhole, once ravaged by a tornado and now left with only its human wreckage intact. Devoid of a stated moral position and totally neutral in its depiction of the degradations inflicted on its subjects, Gummo chronicles the ways in which the local teens manage to inure themselves to violence, sexual perversion, and responsibility for their actions.