I really don’t like the movie Gummo, Harmony Korine’s gung-ho, mostly plotless, home movie-tinted ode to impoverished America. I find the film exploitative, generally unpleasant, and boring. (I recently watched the film again to make sure my opinion held up. It did.) I bring up my opinion of Gummo because Korine’s follow-up feature, Julien Donkey-Boy, is a very similar film in style, only this one has more identifiable main characters and even less plot. Critics savaged Gummo when it came out, and gave Julien Donkey-Boy similar treatment. Gummo has a lot of fans, including noted film directors, but I’m squarely on the side of the critics. So why do I like Julien Donkey-Boy?

Whereas Gummo had mostly non-actors from dark corners of Nashville, Harmony puts recognizable people front and center this time, including Gummo superfan Werner Herzog, and Trainspotting’s Ewan Bremmer in the titular role. Julien is a fast-talking, hyperactive schizophrenic. His sister is pregnant. His brother’s into wrestling. His father is tough on him because he wants his son to be a winner. They live in Queens. Julien hangs out with people with disabilities. And…that’s pretty much the whole movie. There’s no real plot, it’s just a series of vignettes involving the family, all shot through a shakily-maneuvered standard-definition digital camera. Actually, shot through a digital camera, then converted to 16mm film….then converted to 35mm film. The resulting image is very grainy and oddly-colored, giving the film a unique, deliberately terrible look, and that’s already assuming that it’s a scene where Harmony isn’t shooting with lower-quality cameras or filming what he’s shot off a television screen. It’s possible to see the film’s caution-thrown-to-the-wind cinematography as helping to put the audience in Julien’s kinetic mindset, or as presenting the film as a series of dysfunctional home videos. In addition, the film opens with a certificate saying that the film was produced under the guidelines of the Dogme 95 movement. One of the guidelines is that the camerawork must be handheld, and many films produced under the movement have similarly shaky camerawork. However, since Harmony appears to have ignored every other rule in the Dogme 95 guidelines while making this film, I’m not going to consider the movement in regards to his cinematography. I honestly have no idea why that certificate is even there.

Julien Donkey-Boy is among the first films to be shot digitally, and it’s fascinating to see Korine take advantage of new technologies at such a young point in the medium. Scenes are shot a low frame rates using delayed exposure, giving everything a blurred, hallucinogenic look. Editing is rapidly-paced at times—to the point where one scene is entirely made up of half-second shots. His MiniDV camera can be maneuvered with ease, which he demonstrates with his frenetic cinematography. Digital video seems freeing to him, and the audience gets to witness him try out the tools he now has at his disposal.

One of my major complaints about Gummo was that I believed it used legitimately marginalized people to create a sideshow-freak aesthetic. While I admire Korine for giving such people parts in his film, it felt exploitive. Despite Julien’s recognizable main cast, many of the film’s supporting players are non-actors with physical or mental disabilities. Julien spends portions of the film at what appears to be a facility for people with disabilities, and there is a real sense of community among the residents that Gummo’s cast lacked. I really felt for Julien when he joins everyone in dancing at a birthday party with the others at the facility. There’s a sense of genuine warmth in this scene that is surprisingly not diminished by the fact that there is an extended sequence of a performer at the party eating several cigarettes and bringing them back up to smoke them. Also, Herzog plays cards with a man who has no arms, and therefore does everything with his feet. As this is a Harmony Korine film from the 90s, we are supposed to accept these events at face value.

This brings me to an aspect of the film that has always intrigued me, which is that I’m not sure how much of it is staged. Many scenes in this film are shot and played out as if Ewan Bremmer went to certain public locations and acted like a schizophrenic. A lot of scenes in this film are shot like a hidden camera show, with the cinematographer shooting from a distance as Ewan improvises. This is especially curious in what I can loosely refer to as the film’s climax. Julien’s sister has just given birth, but the baby was stillborn due to an ice-skating accident. Julien takes the baby’s corpse and brings it home with him. (It’s heavily implied that Julien is the baby’s father.) What follows is a scene of Julien getting on a Queens bus with the dead baby as people look at him in confusion…and it doesn’t look like acting. The video quality is noticeably lower as well. It’s feels like the world’s darkest episode of Candid Camera.

While we’re on that subject, I’m not sure what the overall tone of the movie is. In one scene, Julien fantasizes about getting a call from his mother, who died in childbirth. She says that she’s a dentist in the afterlife and gives Julien tips on dental care. It’s rather absurdist for what should be a heart-wrenching moment. Plus, there’s Werner Herzog. Oh boy, is there Werner Herzog. He walks around the house with a gas mask on for no reason. He tries the string from the Venetian blinds around his neck and opens and closes the window by moving his head back and forth. He calls a stream-of-consciousness poem Julien created “artsy-fartsy,” before describing the “Do I feel lucky” scene from Dirty Harry at the dinner table with the reverence of an art film critic. It’s utterly hilarious. What exactly is Harmony going for here? A wrenching but heartfelt and funny portrait of a dysfunctional family? A rather politically-incorrect prank film? An excuse to have people just do random stuff in front of a video camera?

Maybe there was a reason Harmony made this a Dogme 95 film. The Dogme 95 manifesto said that directors were no longer artists, and set out to tell interesting stories while showing life as it really was. Maybe Harmony, 26 and already considered either the art house’s biggest pariah or a misunderstood genius, was trying to capitalize on a new and interesting film movement. Or maybe he considered this film a story of life that nobody else filming in New York City wanted to tell. A story of the marginalized and forgotten in the biggest city in the country. It’s rare to see something like this and Gummo released by a studio like Fine Line Features, a division of a major Hollywood studio and media conglomerate, and I haven’t seen much like it since. Harmony, meanwhile, seems to have moved on in the past few years. His latest film in his surprisingly-short oeuvre, The Beach Bum, was his first to receive a major theatrical opening, while his previous film, Spring Breakers, was his first major release in general. I guess he got tired of being “artsy-fartsy.”

Side note: Metrograph preceded this film with a selection of two music videos and a commercial directed by Korine. The first features Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s No More Workhorse Blues set to a video of an African-American man with literal dollar-signs in his eyes and a woman in a bridal gown and blackface. The two do various activities, which are all shown in loops of a few frames each. The other video was for Living Proof by Cat Power, with a slow-motion scene of a high-school track meet where a woman is running with a cross on her back, with the other runners dressed in hijabs. They felt like videos from a karaoke machine you’d find in your dreams (or nightmares, particularly in the former video). An ad for Thornston’s chocolate uses similar visuals as the Workhorse video, with a young boy contemplating while people around him seem stuck in brief by repeating moments of time. Everything returns to normal when the boy realizes what wants–he was writing down something to be put on a personalized piece of chocolate. Harmony’s attitude towards promotional materials is that he knows he’s been commissioned to sell something, but nevertheless remains true to his experimental vision, if not fond of using controversy to attract eyes. Much of the Metrograph audience were amused when the final clip turned out to be an ad for chocolate–although I’m not sure what anyone would have initially thought that ad was for based on the imagery. I just hope Bonnie and Cat had seen Korine’s work before they hired him.

In an era where technology seems to permeate every aspect of our lives, with often terrifying consequences, it seems like we are powerless to control the digital behemoth we have created as if it were some kind of algorithm-powered Frankenstein monster. MoMA’s exhibit New Order: Art and Technology in the Digital Age demonstrates this relationship between the real and digital worlds in ways that I found creative, amusing, and often terrifying. Using a variety of methods including self-run computer animation, sculpture, video, photography, and even film, the art and their artists paint a vivid picture of our current world.
Among my favorite pieces was Skittles by Josh Kline. At first glance, it resembles a simple beverage refrigerator like you’d find at a convenience store—perhaps MoMA added concessions before the exhibit. Look closer, though, and things become less appetizing. Smoothies with questionable—and often inedible—ingredients line the shelves, with each flavor offering a different lifestyle. For example, the Williamsburg flavor is made with bits of credit cards, American Apparel, kale chips, kombucha, microbrew, quinoa, and agave. Yummy. It’s pretty obvious this isn’t real, but if you’re the kind of person who consumes kale chips, kombucha, quinoa, microbrew, and agave while wearing American Apparel, you embody what people imagine when they think of someone who lives in Williamsburg. What you consume is what you are—and here it is, bottled en masse for your convenience.
While I’m on the subject of consumerism, Augmented Objects by Camille Henroit features objects bought on eBay and from street vendors, coated in epoxy, tar, and sand. The results look somewhat similar to their original counterparts and are now unusable. As a result, “Henroit thwarts the normal flow of objects, commodities, and digital networks of exchange.” The black blobs on display look burnt, as if a volcano had just erupted. It’s a chilling metaphor for the futility of our current materialistic lives.
Some of the artists had decidedly less fun with their pieces, including Trevor Paglen with his piece, It Began as a Military Experiment. It presents a series of faces, their features marked with letters around the edges. The images were used by the Department of Defense to compare faces, creating a database of facial recognition that could be used to develop an algorithm that could identify people—which today is on a much larger scale and no longer just part of a private domain. Other pieces were utterly fascinating from a technical level, such as a number of holographic images that I found astounding (though initially a bit hard on the eyes).

The piece I was intrigued by, as well as unsettled by, the most was Xenix by Taylor Robak. Presented on seven screens, the piece depicts what appears to be multiple iterations of an operating system. Graphics depict such trivial tasks as storing food in a refrigerator, scheduling TV shows, chatting, and playing music in the background. One some of the screens though, are guns and a bomb that are initially created in real-time using 3D software. A map often shown in the center of the screen implies sinister military purposes…yet nothing really happens. There are none of the consequences we’d expect from such a setup. At the same time, it shows how much of our lives is carried out on our smartphones and desktops, and perhaps darker things in the future.
In general, I really enjoyed this exhibit, and I liked the ways various artists addressed the roles technology plays in our lives in ways that are unorthodox and ambiguous, but unsettling nonetheless.

When it comes to experimental cinema, I am particularly attracted to animation. Animation can be seen as the foundation on which cinema is based, and by it’s very nature allows for a reconstruction of cinema itself. If cinema or video reflects the world, animation exists outside of reality. There are no rules in animation, save for how well you can draw (or digitally sculpt), and how much patience you have.(The exception being stop-motion, which does require a connection to the world around you.) Much early animation involved playing around with moving drawings, creatively scratching the film stock, or discovering the magic of stop motion. It can be said then, that experimental animation is often about craft.
The program I attended at the Metrograph, Griffiti: Animation by George Griffin, reflects this focus on craft. The first short in the program, Rapid Transit, was done by arranging beans and other objects on a white, lit background in stop motion to create “kinetic, percussive” imagery in time with the background music. (The short was celebrating its 50th anniversary.) the second short, Trikfilm 3, alternated between a surreal hand-drawn animation and scenes of Griffin drawing the piece on a notepad in stop-motion. The stop-motion segments feature Griffin at a table drinking coffee when he decides to start the piece—creating art out of just a notepad and boredom.

One of the more interesting pieces was Flying Fur. The piece was set to the background music from the Tom and Jerry cartoon, Puttin’ on the Dog. Knowing nothing about the source of the music, Griffin animated what he thought would be happening based on the score, only finding out where it was from later. (The piece was shown as Puttin’ on the Fur, in which both the original cartoon and Griffin’s piece were shown side by side. Similarly, Ko-Ko was an an animation using cutouts, animated in rhythm with music by Charlie Parker. The piece was intended to be part of a larger project involving Parker that was never completed.
Midway through the program, there was a documentary by Griffin and DeeDee Halleck, Meadows Green, featuring the Bread and Puppet Theater, a politically radical puppet theater. It was, not surprisingly, an outsider among the rest of the shorts. In a Q&A afterwards, DeeDee claimed that it was difficult to find distribution for the piece on American television. The short simply shows the theater’s antics at their annual Bread and Puppet Circus, occasionally broken up by Griffin’s animation. One of the first questions brought up by executives at PBS was why there wasn’t a narrator, which I found quite telling about the television industry back then: even PBS wanted to play it safe. One short piece near the end, The Bather, stood out to me. The film features a live-action shot of Griffin’s wife bathing behind the shower door, as a drawing of the woman plays in the foreground. In lieu of titles, a description of the short, including plot, genre, and themes, scrolls across the screen, eventually giving the audience some context that would not be otherwise apparent.

The best piece by far, however, was Lineage. A half-hour in length, and combining various types of stop-motion with hand-drawn animation, the piece deconstructs the nature of animation itself in, as Griffin’s Vimeo page puts it, “an anti-cartoon essay on animation’s contradictory legacy: comedy and formalism.” In one part of the short, The character Griffin creates interacts with the version of itself from the previously-drawn frame of animation, before stealing scissors and cutting itself free. This character, in stop-motion, is itself shown using a hand-cranked device to create an animation with moving lines. One section of the piece involves Griffin drawing on photocopied film stock, which moves in stop-motion as he colors it in. As this scene plays, he laments that the capture of images has gone from an art to a means of profit.
I found these pieces interesting and amusing, often in equal measure. All of them and more can be found at
https://vimeo.com/geogrif.