Take the conventions of American teen film, transpose them to the freaky fringes of Los Angeles, anchor them in an uncompromising vision of sexual fluidity and top it all off with a hefty dose of Generation X disillusionment, gonzo violence and hallucinogenic surrealism – and you get something like these daring border crossings by New Queer cinema rebel Gregg Araki. With a gleeful mix of slacker irony and raw sincerity, Godardian cool and punk grunginess, the wildly subversive, hormone-fuelled films of the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy took 1990s indie cinema into new aesthetic realms while giving brilliant expression to teenage rage and libidinous desire.
Gregg Araki was born in Los Angeles in 1959 to Japanese-American parents. In the early 1980s, Araki enrolled at the USC Film School, where his student projects were inspired by New Wave music, the DIY culture of underground art and filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jim Jarmusch and John Waters. Since his film breakthrough with The Living End at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, Araki, together with Isaac Julien and Todd Haynes, has been one of the spearheads of the New Queer Cinema movement. Araki’s three subsequent feature films, which form his highly influential Teen Apocalypse Trilogy, inspired a whole generation of outcasts and queer people to accept themselves and give the middle finger to anyone who dared to judge them.
- Totally Fucked Up
An insane mixture of punk nihilism and dry irony – the first film in Gregg Araki’s “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy” gives Jean-Luc Godard’s classic “Masculin féminin” a daring queer twist. (English with English subtitles) - The Doom Generation
Gregg Araki embarks on a journey to hell in this wild, meth and fast food fuelled road trip through the outskirts of a menacing American wasteland. (English with English subtitles) - Nowhere
You can literally smell the pheromones in this kaleidoscopic odyssey, in which director Gregg Araki combines elements from soap operas with science fiction, indie coolness and glittering pop art subversion. (English with English subtitles)