His Kids Are Alright
Larry Clark gets more teenage thrills with his skate-punk flick 'Wassup Rockers'
Larry Clark is a filmmaker now, and has been at least since 1995, making his debut as a director with a splash of sex, innocence, and cruelty called Kids. It was either loathsome or a masterpiece, depending on your tolerance for simulated teen sex and adolescent self-destruction. And no one should have been surprised. Clark has documented the secret lives of young Americans since he began photographing his friends back in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1962, watching as they ignited their veins with amphetamines, fucked like crazy, and died as anonymously as they'd lived.
All of it should be seen, Clark insists, every moment of human experience - every dark corner or moment of sunshine, your very first syringe or first taste of sex. No secrets, no shame.
"There were all these things that I saw as a kid that you never saw in the media," he says now. "Everybody pulled their punches. You couldn't go to certain places. Why can't you show everything? I started making work to do that, to see things you couldn't see anywhere else."
Much of it was autobiographical, first earning raves and condemnation with two books of blunt reportage, 1971's Tulsa and 1983's Teenage Lust. And today he is a tall man dressed in black, with features dark and imposing, retaining the edge of someone with his own history of addiction, violence, and prison (for a 1976 parole violation). But Clark is also good company, with a warm and easy laugh. At 62, he still rides a skateboard and remains drawn to the margins of urban youth - and their natural scenes of beauty and danger and confusion. It is his calling card, and it's not for everyone. One man's squalor is another's party central.
He's found rich material there, something beautiful and repugnant, dark and comic, from his vivid early black-and-white photography to Kids and four subsequent films, at their best delivering both revelation and confrontation. The message isn't always pleasant or welcome. In 2001's Bully, after one girl is raped and beaten by the doomed title character, her best friend laughs nervously: "Make up your fucking mind. I told you he was kinky!"
In his forthcoming film, Wassup Rockers (opening June 23), Clark wades into another marginalized subculture he discovered by accident: Latino skate-punks in long hair and tight jeans, living deep in the hip-hop nation of South Central L.A. He first met them on the beach in Venice. They had names like Kico and Porky and Jonathan and were fueled on nothing more than the local punkcore of the bands Moral Decay, South Central Riot Squad, the Remains, and the Retaliates. Soon, he was hanging out with them, driving to South Central to pick them up for Saturday-morning skate sessions in his 1995 Toyota Camry - with four or five kids in the backseat, one in the shotgun seat, and maybe two, three, or four in the trunk. Clark told them about Kids and Tulsa and the rest, and said he wanted to make a film about them, too. After a year, and at least one false start, the financing came through.
"These kids should be seen," Clark says. "And these are really good kids - they don't smoke pot, they weren't drinking. I would go to their house, and they'd be having parties and stuff, having so much fun and having their band and playing their instruments in the back. For me it was weird, because I come from a drug culture." He laughs. "These kids don't even smoke pot, and they're having so much fun, falling down laughing."
The finished film offers more of Clark's striking images of American culture clash: South Central skatekids roaring down a Beverly Hills street, colliding with cops and millionaires; a young African American hood firing off his pistol at the sight of them, shouting the greeting, "Wassup, rockers!" And, as with Kids, the film is dominated by non-actors. Clark finds a purity in kids who have never been in front of a movie camera, a naturalness that is hard to replicate with most actors, he says.
"When you're talking about working with the kids, the secret for me is that I really have to know them," he explains. "Then I know what they can do, and I know what they do naturally just in life and mold the scene so they're comfortable enough to do that naturally on camera."
Aside from Wassup Rockers, Clark has been photographing the kids for the last two years and will likely turn that work into another book. "I'll always photograph," he says, even as this newest batch of kids laugh at him for fussing over his old film cameras while they're taking snapshots with their cell phones and e-mailing them across the dimensions.
Many people would rather not look at his pictures or his films, calling the endless images of drug use and naked flesh exploitation or worse. But Clark is part of an astonishing continuum of reportage, maybe taking it deeper into the shadows, making it personal. He found encouragement from the likes of photographers Robert Frank and Ralph Gibson, and inspiration from the great Life magazine photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, from whom Clark first discovered the subtle power of light and drama in a still photograph. He also identified with Smith's uncompromising, quixotic commitment to his work.
"He used to write these diatribes in magazines, in Popular Photography and stuff, about 'The truth! The truth! I want to get the truth! And Life magazine won't let me get the truth! I need a year to do this photo essay!' So he quit Life because of that. But I was very impressed by that," Clark says. "It was like a teenager's take on the world: Why can't things be the way I want them to be? And that was Gene's thing. I kind of related to that. When I did Tulsa, it was about that: I can do anything I want to, because it's the truth, the truth. I was very into that."
Last year, New York's International Center of Photography held a retrospective of Clark's work. Tulsa has been republished, and he's frequently approached about republishing Teenage Lust, but he's not much interested. "I'm a filmmaker now," he says again and again. "I'm moving ahead. I don't have time to go back and do all this shit again!"
Even as a filmmaker now, he's made a few side trips, like Teenage Caveman, a silly 2002 horror-show flick he shot on the cheap for laughs, which was identifiably his mainly from the few scenes of teen sex and thrills. More meaningful, and notorious, that same year was Ken Park, codirected with cinematographer Ed Lachman, and still unreleased in the U.S. For that, Clark blames music-clearance issues, but the film also happens to be his most lurid, a study of conflict between teens and their families, with a scene of full-frontal masturbation as one kid gets off on the grunts of a female tennis match on TV. At most, another director would have shot it as a close-up on the kid's face, merely implying the sex act. Clark never considered it. "Why not show it?"
Clark would like to see the film released here. At the same time, he doesn't exactly advocate that everyone should see it. "Boy, what a scene that is," he says with a smile. "There's a scene where censorship is needed. You don't need young teenagers to see that. I wouldn't want my son when he was 13 or 12 to see that. It's a very disturbing scene. Did I just endorse censorship? Oh, my god."Published: 05/25/2006
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