Larry Clark (1943 - )
Related: realism in film - 1943 - director - Ken Park (2002)
Ken Park (2002) - Larry Clark, Edward Lachman
His most common subject is youth on the fringe of society who casually engage in underage drug use, violence or sex and who are part of a subculture like punk or skateboarding that "accepts" these activities. As adolescence is the most vulnerable time in life, Clark intends for his exposure of these teenage social taboos to be jumping-off points for popular dialogue, not only to be of shock value. [Jan 2007]
Profile
Larry Clark (born in 1943) is a US movie director and photographer. He got his start taking pictures and works mostly with black and white images. Some of his more common subjects include youth, especially on the fringes of society. Similar topics would include but not be limited to skateboarding, drug-use, same-sex relationships etc.
After publishing a few books, including Tulsa and the adult Teenage Lust, he met a young writer named Harmony Korine in New York. Together they worked on the screenplay for a movie entitled Kids.
Mr. Clark has an interest in youth and drug culture, as many interviews with him have explained, as he used to be involved with both. His films often deal with seemingly lurid material but are told in a straight-forward manner. His artistry shows through with the moving images as much as with his still ones.
Clark spent a few hours in a prison cell after punching and trying to strangle Hamish McAlpine, the head of Metro Tartan, the UK distributor for Ken Park. McAlpine was left with a broken nose. The argument was allegedly about 9/11, and violence erupted (according to McAlpine) soon after Clark refered to Arabs as 'Sand Niggers'. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Clark [Oct 2004]
Kids (1995) - Larry Clark
Kids (1995) - Larry Clark [Amazon.com]
Larry Clark's controversial film about New York City adolescents walking the AIDS tightrope is also an unblinking look at the dehumanizing rituals of growing up. But it really doesn't add up to more than the sum of its various shocks--virgin busting, skinny-dipping, male callousness--overlayed with middle-class disapproval. Clark is hectoring us for cutting kids loose at a terrible time in modern American history, but so are a lot of other people, who also offer alternatives and ideas. The film does nothing to push us toward new thoughts, new solutions, new dreams. It is more like a window onto our worst fantasies about what our children are doing out there on the streets. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com
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