Harmony Korine’s debut feature is an audacious, lyrical evocation of America’s rural underbelly, and an elegy in the southern-gothic tradition of William Faulkner and William Eggleston. Shot in Korine’s native Nashville—standing in for the tornado-ravaged Xenia, Ohio—the rough-hewn film follows two young friends, Tummler and Solomon, as they ride around town, huffing glue and hunting stray cats, their every local encounter charged with vaudevillian anarchy as well as deep pathos. At once transgressive and empathetic, disturbing and undeniably beautiful, Gummo is a one-of-a-kind portrait of angelic and devilish souls caught in a cultural void, circumscribed by poverty and the depleted, alienated spiritual life of late-twentieth-century America.
Technical Specifications
Supplements
- New interview with Harmony Korine
- Conversation from 1997 between Harmony Korine and filmmaker Werner Herzog
- Projections episode from 2000 featuring Harmony Korine in conversation with Split Screen host John Pierson
- Trailer
- An appreciation by filmmaker Hype Williams