Like his characters, Korine has chosen to live on the periphery - or at least the periphery of his field. His oeuvre is ruthlessly experimental, described by even his fans as “scatterbrained” while they sing his praises as a visionary artist. On March 21st, he’s bringing two screenings of his new film Baby Invasion to Knockdown Center. Not a movie theater, or a screening room, or even a performance theater, but instead a music venue.
Baby Invasion features the premier of a never-before-heard score by none other than Burial, and is shot in the style of a first person shooter video game, with a live chat scrolling to the side of the frame. Some responses have been rapturous, while others describe it as unwatchable. If all you knew of Korine was his screenplay for Kids, 2012’s EDM-soaked surprise hit Spring Breakers and occasional archival Letterman appearances, his other recent work might seem overwhelmingly strange. But Korine has always pushed the formal constraints of cinema and used ferociously unnerving tactics to overwhelm the audience and to explore the sorrow and decrepitude of American life.
Korine himself is on record describing Trash Humpers as “the most American movie ever made,” even suggesting it be screened in schools because of its flattering portrayal of America. That’s a stretch on a lot of levels, but in all his work, you can feel Korine trying to access a sort of unmediated aesthetic rapture over linear narrative continuity. Describing 1997’s Gummo, he once said the film was about “specific scenes” rather than plot. When probed further about the precise meaning of some of these scenes, he veered into a tangent about a piece of bacon taped to a wall in the film's infamous spaghetti-in-the-bathtub scene. “I personally like, well.. bacon is my aesthetic, essentially. As far as it being humorous, taped bacon is something I really get excited about.”
One of the most famous lines from Gummo is “life is beautiful, really it is, full of beauty and illusions.” And yet it's set in an Ohio town that has just been devastated by a hurricane, with characters living abject lives filled with terror and degradation. Trauma and hardship are woven into the film on an atomic level, with a loose, vignette story structure that submerges itself in the chronic dread of living in a world where violence could explode at any second. But in the detritus, Korine’s camera lingers on the strange, eerie sorta-beauty of the crummy and the banal. He finds uncanny erotic charge in fleeting moments and crafts images that burn into your brain. Think of Bunny Boy, in his pink rabbit ears, playing accordion on the toilet. Even if you haven’t seen the movie in years, it’s probably easy to recall.
2024’s Aggro Dr1ft, on the other hand, was shot entirely in infra-red and follows “the world’s greatest assassin.” It feels like a film-length video game cut scene, and seems to have nothing to do with the melancholic late ‘90s grit he made his name on. He recently pondered “if there was something that comes after conventional film,” likening the experience of watching Aggro Dr1ft to “a rave.” It’s a question worth asking - one which positions his most recent films in a truly experimental lineage. You could shut down the whole inquiry out of hand by saying we have raves for raving and films for visual storytelling, but… that doesn't quite answer the question, does it? Like so many experiments, Korine’s “what if” needs to be seen through in good faith to discover if it might bear fruit.
“We want to excite ourselves,” he said recently, “because no one is giving this to us, so we create it.” Knockdown Center is proud to present two Baby Invasion on March 21st plus an afterparty featuring DJ sets from Yves Tumor, Harmony Korine and more.