“Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness. How pleasant then to be insane!”     – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Other Stories

Harmony Korine (b. 1973) counts among the few authentic artists working within American cinema today. Admired by Werner Herzog, who has named Korine a “warrior of cinema” and acted in two of his films, Korine has remained true to the promise of his acclaimed and controversial 1997 debut Gummo, a visually dazzling and richly archaic film poem about untamed, misfit youth made with a cast of principally non-actors and following an oneiric and associational collage structure. Channeling the creative spirit and visionary film language of Jean Vigo, Béla Tarr and Leos Carax, Gummo also announced Korine’s abiding preoccupation with radically dysfunctional families which has remained a major theme of his work and has made him, arguably, a secret heir of sorts to Nicholas Ray. In subsequent work such as julien donkey-boy and Mister Lonely, Korine has continued to define a brand of high art film quite unlike any other, alternately injected with melancholy and whimsy and pervaded throughout by a trance inducing, indeed at times almost hallucinatory, quality. A true independent in an age when “indie” filmmaking has become a deliberately false label and cover for formulaic mainstream pabulum, Korine’s films offer a sustained critique of the artistic vacuity effecting so much of contemporary American cinema. With his latest film, Spring Breakers, Korine offers a full-on siege of Hollywood with a delirious, ribald and ultra-violent teensploitation picture that upturns and explodes every rule of the genre, its extreme characters cartoon versions of sexual nymphs and villains that horrifically and hilariously embody the worst Bacchanalian and narcissistic tendencies in American youth and pop culture today.

We are thrilled that Harmony Korine will accompany his films on two evenings at the HFA to discuss his provocative work. — Haden Guest