Julien Donkey-Boy Harmony Korine's Julien Term Paper

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Rather, the monologue is concerned with the Spanish conquest of Peru. The audio recording is low quality - it almost sounds like it was recorded on a cassette tape recorder, and it probably was. This lo-fi aesthetic gives the overall montage a decidedly "home made" feel - one that resonates with the suburban reality that the characters inhabit - and effectively pervert through their actions - throughout the course of the film.

Korine makes frequent use of the "slide show" technique throughout Julien Donkey-Boy. This exploitation of still photography consists of a series of still images, typically covering one series of activities, or perhaps an entire afternoon, over which a soundtrack of dialogue is played. In one such sequence, we see Julien and a friend of his doing a number of mundane things, such as making Xerox copies of some kind of document and bowling. Over this series of still images, we hear the dialogue that Julien and his friend are having, verbatim, in each scene. This sequence, which ends in the bowling alley, gracefully reverts to live action sequencing at this point, and we find Julien and his friends in the bowling alley, completely in synch with the soundtrack, as though they had been filmed "normally" all along. Still, in another sequence, we see a series of photographs of the sister "playing" outside their small house, as though she were a little girl - despite the fact that she is, in fact, a young woman who happens to be pregnant. In the soundtrack, we hear her voice reciting a series of proper names - presumably trying to decide what she will name her baby.

The graininess of the video quality throughout gives the film a hard edge that we are not used to seeing in more polished mainstream cinema. This somehow makes it all the more realistic, despite the fact that some of the scenarios are hard to believe. What is more, Korine eschews artificial lighting throughout, opting instead for natural light.

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The harshness of the lighting in many of the scenes casts strange shadows on the actors' faces, making them appear more vulnerable, yet also more sinister. At times, the scenes are even overexposed, and we are nearly blinded by the imposition of sun. In one of the more bizarre segments, Julien is seen washing the feet of a young girl in a bathroom that is completely illuminated by a red light, such as one finds in a photographic darkroom; this sinister, almost Satanic affect clashes violently with the innocence of their conversation. Again, such techniques have been consciously employed to emphasize the materiality of the film itself, exposing the limitations of the video medium.

This imperfection is occasionally taken to extremes, such as the scene when the sister is at the gynecologist for a check-up. The camera deliberately blurs during the operation, making it hard for us to see clearly what is going on. At other moments, the camera will shift to the perspective of one of the characters. In order to accomplish this, Korine had the actors wear hidden cameras in certain scenes and go out and interact with real people. You can usually tell when this happens, because the camera work is even shakier and fuzzier than it normally is.

Julien Donkey-Boy is by no means an easy film to watch. Since we live in a culture in which film proliferates, we have grown up with a certain idea of what movies are supposed to be like. In "normal" films, the technical aspects of the film are not supposed to call attention to themselves; in Julien Donkey-Boy, however, those technical aspects take center stage, exceeding all other filmic elements - plot, characters, script, etc. - in importance. This self-consciousness is highly effective not only in presenting a new form of filmmaking, but also in giving the viewer the opportunity to learn how to watch a film in a new way......

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