Trash Humpers
Screening on Film
$12 Special Event Tickets
With Rachel Korine, Brian Kotzur, Travis Nicholson.
UK/US, 2010, 35mm, color, 78 min.
Print source: Drag City
A (not so) secret sequel to Gummo, Korine’s fourth feature returned once more to the Nashville hometown that was the indelible setting of his debut film, offering now a garish, nocturnal vision not of feral, feverish youth but of gothic geriatrics, rubber masked, hunch-backed caricatures of decrepitude lurking in alleys and under bridges to enact ritualistic, almost folkloric, decapitations of dolls and sexual release on the lumpy bags of garbage that are their objects of ecstatic fascination. Shot on ultra low-res video and gleefully rejecting any pretense at narrative structure, Trash Humpers drives a sharpened rusty spur into the flank of glib YouTube narcissism, offering its shimmering video imagery of degenerate “homeless movies” as an antidote to facile DYI cinema. Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s haunting photographic poems and William Eggleston’s cult video, Stranded in Canton, haunt Korine’s most ambitious and still misunderstood anti-cinema manifesto.