THE CINEMA OF HARMONY KORINE: REALISM, FICTION, AND IMPLICATIONS ON GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Abstract

This article conciliates the perspectives of gender, sexuality, and violence, and the polysemic capacity of the image and its dynamics involved in the filmography of director Harmony Korine. The cinematographic image is analysed as a means of expression and perception of North American youth and adolescence. The film corpus is formed by the movies Kids (1995), Ken Park (2002) and Spring Breakers (2013). In all three films, Korine rejects the prototypical, standardized representations of both adolescence and youth, and productively challenges their common representations in the media. The methodology of the socio-semiotic analysis of the film has been combined with gender studies that have corroborated that the cinema is a vehicle of communication, influence, and socio-cultural representation and as such, is conditioned by its environment and will reflect significant elements, and that the disruptor of the fixed norms of gender in the narratives contributes to weakening the patriarchal logic and the androcentric order, historically multipliers of violence and inequality. Finally, it is suggested the development of the work towards a field of research that articulates the semiotic analysis of films with the implication of the perspective of gender and sexuality.