"Gummo" Dislike and praise, shadow and light, Harmony Korine's shocking debut work

"Gummo" synopsis

A small town called Genia in Ohio. A dog gets caught in a TV antenna after being blown away by a tornado. Boys kill and sell stray cats to earn pocket money, and girls search for their missing pet cat. Adults get drunk and arm wrestle and start wrestling with chairs. An old woman connected to a ventilator in a mansion full of garbage. A shirtless boy wearing pink bunny ears and wandering around with a skateboard in hand. The images of people living in impoverished areas, abandoned by the rest of the world, always surrounded by a sense of loss, are depicted through nursery rhymes and death metal.

Index

• The debut work of a “terrifying child” that caused an uproar around the world.
• Unique film aesthetics cultivated through film education for gifted talents and the streets
• Many of the performers are residents of poor areas.
• What is genius director Alan Clarke's shocking work ``Christine''?
• The shooting scene was more chaotic than the movie
• If you do something bad, you'll be paid $1,000 on the spot.
• What are the merits and demerits of a cult work that has not faded even after a quarter of a century?

The debut work of a “terrifying child” that caused an uproar around the world.

It's like a movie that collects forgotten memories and compresses them into 89 minutes. A rural town that was hit by a tornado in the 1970s. The film is described as being set in Genia, Ohio, but it is unclear which town or era it is in (the film was filmed in Nashville in 1997).

A dog gets caught in a TV antenna after being blown away by a tornado. Boys kill and sell stray cats to earn pocket money, and girls search for their missing pet cat. Adults get drunk and arm wrestle and start wrestling with chairs. An old woman connected to a ventilator in a mansion full of garbage. A shirtless boy wearing pink bunny ears and wandering around with a skateboard in hand. ``Gummo'' (1997) depicts people living in impoverished areas, seemingly abandoned by the world, and always surrounded by a sense of loss.

"Gummo" preview

Director Harmony Korine was 23 years old when she filmed Gummo. He was 19 years old when he wrote the script for photographer Larry Clark's directorial debut, ` `Kids '' (1995), and attracted attention as a ``frightening child'' who vividly captured the reality of street kids. . Harmony's statements at the time were a complex mix of arrogance, rebelliousness, and self-promotion, making it difficult to discern what he really meant, but he was an exceptional movie buff and wanted to make his own films.

``Kids'' was highly praised for its documentary touch, which featured anonymous street kids, but for Harmony, the script was written at Clark's request, and he wanted his first directorial work to be a different kind of work that stands out. I had decided. Abandoning traditional storytelling such as the three-act structure, he wanted to create, in Harmony's own words, "a film that felt like a collage or tapestry."

``Gummo'' does not have a clear story. Boys ride bicycles, kill cats, and use glue, and sisters with bleached hair search for their missing pet cat.Although I can barely find anything that seems to be a plot, it is a miscellaneous resident who seems to have no connection. It can be said that our daily lives are the main characters. No one has any vision for the future, and they are wasting their time lazily, but strangely there is no sense of sadness.

The greatest appeal of ``Gummo'' is that the fragments of this scattered life are woven together like a poem. Unlike fiction, everyday life has no clear beginning or end. Harmony is obsessed with finding beauty and ugliness in every moment of the process, and has created a unique world that is neither funny nor sad. Gus Van Sant called it ``completely original,'' and Harmony's admired director Werner Herzog praised it as ``In a sense, it's a true science fiction work, a gentle look at a vision of the future where soul and spirituality are lost.'' (Herzog is particularly fond of the fried bacon stuck to the bathroom wall.)