HARMONY ENFANT TERRIBLE
All Korine's Transgressions By Domenico Monetti

Harmony Korine's next film is halfway between a snuff movie and Buster Keaton. The 25 -year - old director of Gummo launches a new provocation: "I go around provoking passers - by, trying to start a fight while the video camera follows me and films everything. It's very brutal - I've already broken a collar bone and been arrested. The punches and kicks are all real, it's one of the most disgusting things you'll ever see. I wanted to push humour to extreme limits to demonstrate that there's a tragic component in everything." Meeting Harmony Korine has the same shocking effect as seeing one of his films. Direct, sincere and disturbing. But his eyes aren't without a future, but instead are dazzling and full of energy. Like all difficult characters, he denies the past: "I wrote Kids when I was 18 for the director Larry Clark, a person I'm completely indifferent about," he affirms. "However, Kids permitted me to make my directorial debut: Gummo, my first deconstruction of cinema." Harmony's got a red tattoo of an upside down pitchfork on his right hand: "It's the Devil. My diabolical side," explains the enfant terrible who ran away from home at the age of 16, who suddenly goes on to show the tattoo on his arm: "This, on the other hand, is an Angel. My good side." He raises his left hand and on his finger is another overturned cross. Korine's duality doesn't exist and all of his gestures and words are capable of pulling you down: "Even though I was born into a Jewish family, I don't belong to any religion. I'm not an atheist, I believe in a higher power. You have to believe in something, otherwise it would be hard getting out of bed in the morning." Harmony Korine and scandals. An indissoluble link. Gummo provoked a lot of reaction from animal rights people due to the violence against cats. julien donkey - boy - Dogma 6 audaciously shows a happy sadistic, schizophrenic and monstrous American family: "Everything you see in the film is real. I had to cut a lot of scenes, because the film was originally six and a half hours long with a lot of heavy scenes." Politically incorrect and pessimistic are accusations which Korine doesn't accept: "It isn't true that my films are nihilistic. I think I'm apolitical. When I work on an idea, my aim is to create something innovative. Cinema is all pretty much the same, with the exception of a few, such as Godard, Fassbinder or Cassavetes. Film is still in its infancy. I make movies because no one has made a film that I'd like to see at the cinema. I'm 25, I've got my own syntax. Why would I relate to films by Scorsese? My myths are David Lynch and Michael Powell." Harmony Korine stops for a minute and gets his breath back: "Sex and love are only other types of suffering. I think that hope exists, but I haven't found it yet. Maybe it's in film and not in real life. That's why I create another life."

JULIEN DONKEY - BOY
Skeletons In The Closet by Domenico Monetti

julien donkey - boy is the second full - length film by one of America's youngest and most transgressive directors: "The film centres on the figures of my uncle, brother and dad. Until he was 20, my uncle was an ordinary person, then he started hearing voices in his head. It was the first sign of schizophrenia," says 25 - year - old filmmaker, Harmony Korine. "The idea of mental illness has always fascinated me; its downward slide and the consequences it has for a person and their family. Initially I wanted my uncle to star in the movie, but he's been in a psychiatric hospital for the last 25 years. His mental condition was too serious. I gave the part to Ewen Bremner. Ewen had already worked for five months in a mental hospital." The figure of Julien is very complex: He works as a caretaker in a school for the blind, helping them move within the world around them. Julien is schizophrenic and lives with his pregnant sister Pearl [Chloë Sevigny], his high school athlete brother Chris [Evan Neumann], his grandmother [Joyce Korine] and his overbearing and violent father [Werner Herzog]. The renowned German director had already played a sadistic father in the Australian film Man Of Flowers. "In julien donkey - boy I wanted to push the idea of reality and truth in film to the limit,” explains the director. "I don’t think that reality exists in film, except maybe in the poetic reality and beauty present in the films of Dreyer, Ozu and Bresson. I used 30 cameras at the same time in this film because I wanted the editing to be a kind of mathematical operation: Camera 16 to camera 20, camera 12...” In julien donkey - boy there isnit a script. All of this seems paradoxical as Korine began his film as a scriptwriter: "I'm a scriptwriter who doesn't believe in a written script. A script is something dead, paper and ink are inanimate objects, while the actors and cameras are right there in front of you, alive. Why impose a script full of dead ideas onto real life?"

Dogme And Heresy by Ciprea Cannavò

The manifesto "Dogme 95" signed by Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in Copenhagen on Monday March 13 1995, seemed like a joke [Vow Of Chastity, etc.] However, it finally exploded onto the scene at Cannes 1998, with the premieres of Vinterberg's Festen and Lars Von Trier's Idiots. Two years later the Dogme is still making headlines with Harmony Korine's julien donkey - boy. During work on the film, Korine received a call from Lars Von Trier. Harmony accepts not only the aesthetic relationship with the two Danish directors, but also the concept of stripping down film: No script, no soundtrack and optical elaboration, but hand - held cameras. Korine was supported by the director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle and the editor Valdis Oskardottir, who had both already worked on two "dogmatic" films: Festen and Søren Kragh - Jacobsen's Mifune’s Last Song [receiving a Silver Bear at Berlin in 1999]. Other Dogme films in the pipeline are: Jean - Marc Barr's Lovers and Too Much Flesh by the same director who is, however, beginning to reject some Dogme rules, such as the use of natural lighting, sound and music. Lars Von Trier wants to pull out all the copies of Idiots because the producers have added colour arbitrarily. Is an anti - Dogme heretical movement to be born? Time will tell.

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