Harmony Korine has enjoyed success at IFFR in the past, winning the KNF award for Gummo in 1998 and presenting Julien donkey-boy here two years later. But it's the social side of Rotterdam that made the biggest impression, he tells Ben Walters
“I met this one girl when I was walking back to the hotel late at night,” he recalls. “She was like six months pregnant and drinking a beer and standing under a tree, and she had pulled her skirt up above her knees and she was sticking a fork in her anus. I asked what she was doing and she said her ass was very itchy. That's one of the reasons I love coming to Rotterdam.”
It's a vignette somewhat in keeping with the tone of Korine's latest film, Trash Humpers, a lo-fi ode to creative destruction, shot on VHS and edited on a couple of VCRs, in which Korine and various cronies in old-age make-up hang out, smash thing up, dance around and – yes – hump trash.
“I was a child of the '80s and the first camera I had was a VHS camera,” Korine recalls. “I remember what it was like reusing the same cassette tapes, the way the image would degrade. This specific movie was supposed to mimic a found artefact, something found buried in a ditch or floating in a Ziploc bag with blood on it, and I thought it would be nice to see it on VHS. I thought if we were doing it correctly it needed to be filled with glitches and mistakes, so that's what we did, me and an editor sitting in a living room in our boxer shorts in summer.”
As affectionate towards analogue technology as Korine is, even that came second to the joys of mayhem – as the numerous shots of old TV sets being bashed around attest. “The movie was mostly an ode to vandalism and destruction as a creative force,” Korine says, "the idea that blowing shit up is a beautiful thing. These guys transcend violence and become artists of mayhem. Part of it goes back to being a kid and remembering how good it felt to smash things.”
Korine's friend Cameron Jamie is also at IFFR with Massage the History, a short about an unconventional dance group in Alabama whose work partly inspired the dancing and humping in Korine's film. “We thought they'd make a really good double bill,” he says. “The kind of thing that would make people jump out of windows and start humping trees.”
More about Trash Humpers here.
More about Massage the History here.