Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:the star of Performance (I forget his name) . . .

cjh wrote:I found myself nodding in agreement at the telly the other night when bequiffed cineaste Mark Kermode struggled to find anything good to say about Mister Lonely (a film described in a newspaper here last week as 'so pointless and irritating that after a while I literally found it difficult to breathe')

'he can't direct and he can't write, he can't edit and he can't construct a narrative'.

Cranius wrote:I don't particularly see why any of these things should be obstacles to making a great film....

bequiffed cineaste Mark Kermode

In 1999 Harmony Korine, then 25, started on his third film, Fight Harm. To a reporter at the Venice Film Festival he explained, an uncertain time into production, "I go around provoking passers-by, trying to start a fight while the video camera follows me and films everything. It's very brutal -- I've already broken a collar bone and been arrested. The punches and kicks are all real, it's one of the most disgusting things you'll ever see. I wanted to push humour to extreme limits to demonstrate that there's a tragic component in everything."

The production was halted shortly after, with Korine having to serve a mandatory two-and-a-half-months prison sentence following three arrests. Extensive injuries suffered combined with his own underestimating of the length of fights had him later abandon the project entirely.

He explained this to Tod Lippy in an interview which featured in Lippy's book Projections 11 (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2000), "There is no winner or loser attached to the altercation. It is not about victory, it's more a spectacle of perseverance: how much heart does the bleeding man have. I can safely say that for the time being, I have abandoned any and all notions of completing this film in the manner and length it was conceived."

Originally conceived as a 90-minute feature, and for a short time known as Cinema of Cruelty, it was meant to be, Korine has said, "the funniest film ever made, like Buster Keaton makes a snuff movie."

Fight Harm was shot in Manhattan, with a camera crew, headed by friend David Blaine, secretly recording the fights, and with strict instructions not to intervene...

"I would go around with a camera crew, and the only rules were that I couldn't throw the first punch and the person I was confronting had to be bigger than me. Because that's where the humour comes in. It wouldn't be funny if I was fighting someone my size. They had to be bigger than me, and no matter how bad I was getting beat up -- unless I was gonna die, that was the rule, unless I was like passed out and they were still killing me -- they [the camera crew] couldn't break it up. Because that's were the comedy comes in as well."

After each brawl, Korine would explain the points of the excercise to the unsuspecting participants who, remarkably, in most cases, agreed to sign a release.

"I did a few fights -- one after the other. But what I didn't really think about was how short hard-core fights last. When you're fucking hitting each other in the head with bricks, it can only go two or three minutes, so out of the six or seven fights that I did, I have maybe fifteen minutes of pure, hard-core bone breaking.

"I'd gotten so badly injured making it that both my ankles were broken and my ribs were busted. I've been to court seven times but I've only gotten three assault and battery charges... "