Is there a time when a film is not a film? Harmony Korine’s new feature, Trash Humpers, puts this question in the spotlight. It’s unusual (in both form and content), it reveals a lot about spectatorship in cinema, and it had its UK premiere at the London Film Festival recently.
Indeed, Korine speaks of his new work not as a film, but as a document; a record; a recovery of something. There is no discernible plot, progression or dramatic tension. Simply, it’s a fictionalised cinematic diary entry; eighty minutes of footage shot (on a really bad camera, recorded on a really bad tape) by a group of elderly folk, documenting their anti-social, vulgar and outrageous activity. This includes dry humping dustbins and defecating in the street.
But this is no Jackass for geriatrics. For one, Korine’s audience for the movie will be primarily art house as the alienating quality of the ‘footage’, the extremity of the material and the lack of any kind of narration or shape of the footage ensure this. And, secondly, if we are buying into the conceit of the film, we have to ask ourselves why these people were filming themselves at all.
Regardless of whether the film is any good, it’s work like this that gets us to examine the relationship between film and audience. This is not new, as there have been many recent examples covering such ground. Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, released a movie called Shirin, featuring a series of close-up shots of women watching a film (which we, as the audience, never see as we are viewing the viewer). Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait was an impeccably filmed football match as filmed in the most glorious, cinematic way possible (blurring cinema and TV, art with ‘the people’). And of course The Blair Witch Project (itself inspired by The Last Broadcast and Cannibal Holocaust) brought the idea of the ‘found footage’ into the money-spinning mainstream. In this audience/content relationship field, Korine is not on his own.
In all these films, the filmmakers have brought a new way of looking at something and/or a new subject to an already established audience. Zidane is bringing football to the arthouse and arthouse to football fans. Shirin is asking arthouse audiences to watch themselves whilst Blair Witch made home movies frightening. All have transcended and questioned what an audience is and aimed to transform the ordinary expectations of a certain audience into something extraordinary. They convert things an audience wouldn’t stereotypically go near into spectacles.
Naturally, cinema began as a medium conveying spectacle, immediately provoking discussions concerning the role of the spectator and Korine appears to continue these discussions with Trash Humpers. If we take art, as amongst other things, something that presents life from a perspective we haven’t seen before, cinema never did become an art form; it was born one. As a fresh perspective is new and different, it will cause discussion and possible disagreement. From its big-screen birth (debatably starting with the Lumiere brothers’ shorts of everyday Paris life premiered in Paris’s Salon Indien du Grand Café, where proceedings were as much about the medium they were delivered through, than the subjects of the film itself) to the pioneering early twentieth century narrative, fiction films of Georges Méliès, valuable cinema has always provided these discussions about itself, the things it depicts and the people receiving it. It’s about the spectator as part of and aside from, a situation of an action.
This is exactly what Korine is discussing with Trash Humpers. On the surface, the shock and awe provocations of Trash Humpers are a natural extension of Jackass and Dirty Sanchez’s actions. And the almost unbelievable ridiculousness of events are clearly designed to make us laugh. However his filming style, the film’s lack of traditional narrative and structure (and also Korine’s revelations that there was no script, that the order we see things on screen is the order in which they were filmed) and the audience he is showing this to, seem somewhat out of kilter with the film’s content.
Perhaps Korine is bringing art house social commentary to the Jackass generation, or the art house audience to Jackass. Perhaps this film is actually profoundly frightening. The video camera has now been around for the period of time, that it has become available to the very fringes of society. Korine is turning the spectacle of outrageous street stunts back in our face, and providing no answers. Perhaps these old people have seen Dirty Sanchez and are keen to make their own version. He’s providing us with the bi-product of the Jackass generation, giving it both some kind of dignity but also exposing its awful truth, by increasing the size of it from TV to cinema screen.
It’s a fearless soul that makes a film like Trash Humpers. It’s made by someone who wants to get us to ask big questions, who is highly intelligent and very aware of what this film will do. Yet, somewhere at the back of my mind, I still have doubts. As the full, and well-received, screening of the movie at the LFF proves, perhaps there is an audience for both. Indeed, a certain free-spirit would be attracted to Korine’s provocations. Would this free-spirit also be attracted to Jackass originally? Clearly this film raises many questions, not least, the shock of the old.
