PHROOM

TRASH HUMPERS

Harmony Korine

text by: Matteo Cremonesi

«Everything has become «images, algorithms, mathematical ferocity and accumulation of nothing in the form of money“. Everything was sucked into a financial black hole. Thus humanity seems increasingly incapable of empathy and solidarity. History now appears as an infinite flow in which fragmentary images recombine. Politics is a frenetic and precarious activity without any strategic vision. But if it is true that, as Holderlin says, precisely where there is danger, salvation originates, it is necessary to immerse oneself in horror. It is therefore necessary to map the “wasteland” where the social imagination lies as frozen and subjected to the recombinant corporate imagination. And from here we start again to try to reactivate people’s sensitivity so that humanity can once again recognize itself, its desiring, empathetic and vital abilities».
Franco Berardi

Film written and directed by director Harmony Korine in 2009, “Trash Humpers” is a work that boldly brings the complex cinematic vision and the director’s gaze on society to the extreme. The movie, shot with a low definition video camera and edited directly on VHS through 2 old video recorders, differs from all the previous productions of the director, ideally and formally positioning itself in opposition to works such as “Mister Lonely”, film which shows an attention and a photographic cleaning that “Trash Humpers” certainly questions.
Without a precise logical thread, consisting of a sequence of scenes with a Dadaist flavor in which we see strange and improbable masked characters performing absurd and grotesque actions, the film concretizes the perception and impression of a social unease and destructive ability that finds its climax and its expressive epicenter precisely in the spastic character of the same actions shown.

Coupling with the rubbish bins, breaking and devastating abandoned houses and firing firecrackers on deserted streets, continuing to emit strange and shrill sounds or singing disturbing and senseless rhymes; spying at night from the windows of the houses, playing basketball in provincial fields with dressed-up children that entertain themselves by dragging and torturing dolls, the figures of “Trash Humpers” are presences, ghost and monstrous expression of a social depression of which we too often wish not to see the crudest expression.

Wonderfully dirty, casual, senseless, ugly, brutal, restless, badly done, the narrative and formal extremization constituted by “Trash Humpers” serves perhaps to a single purpose, that of putting ourselves through his images in front of the lack of sense of a society now incapable of being beyond the performance of the show and the story itself. An incapacity so industrious that only the extreme is necessary and true.