Trash Humpers is at least as disruptive and exceptional as Harmony Korine’s earlier films Gummo (1997) and Julien Donkey-Boy (1999). The title should be taken literally: the protagonist, unrecognisable thanks to sinister masks, gets his kicks by humping trash cans. With much satanic pleasure and liberated of any sense of morality, the pariahs ‘torture’ dolls and destroy what they come across or set fire to it. Korine, who plays one of the leading roles, wants to show the creative beauty of destruction.
He filmed his ode to vandalism on video, doing part of the camera work himself, and edited it on two video recorders. At the top of the screen, the commands (forward, rewind) are occasionally plainly visible. In a time when everyone wants to shoot at the highest possible technical quality, he chooses the graininess and imperfection of video, which makes the images even more alarming. The largely improvised scenes seem to follow each other in a random order. The viewer does not even have a narrative structure to cling onto.
Film details
- Country of production
- UK
- Year
- 2009
- Festival edition
- IFFR 2010
- Length
- 78"
- Medium/Format
- 35mm
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