“Dance, bitch. Dance, bitch. Dance, bitch.” [1]

The words repeat themselves endlessly, dispassionately, droning onward and drifting aimlessly about from the utterances of a masked figure, words divorced from any sort of narrative logic or cause-and-effect progression, divorced from character motivation or growth, divorced from time and space itself. This is a typical line of dialogue from Harmony Korine’s AI-inflected, infrared-laden AGGRO DR1FT (2023), a largely plotless film set in Florida that centers on an assassin named BO (Jordi Mollà) and his quest to vanquish a demonic crime lord. It is arguably Korine’s most formally aggressive experimental film since Trash Humpers (2007) forced viewers to become reacquainted with the grainy audiovisual smear of VHS aesthetics while watching Korine et al. do weird things while wearing weird masks and espousing weird non-sequiturs. And it is this snippet of dialogue that might best reflect Korine’s own musings that the film’s screenplay is littered with what he termed “platitudes”[2] immediately after its North American premiere during a Q&A at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023. He continued:

“I liked, you know, certain things in gaming, or dialogue in GTA [Grand Theft Auto] … I had this kind of idea of just, platitudes and repetition, and this kind of like, looping dialogue… Almost like trance [music]… How can you do that in 2D? How can you do that narratively?”[3]

It is fascinating to note Korine’s observation here, one that connects the dots between the unique aesthetics and mechanics of video games with those of electronic music, experimental, and art cinema, all discrete forms of artistry and yet each ripe for uncharted cross-breeding. For Korine, there is a certain allure to the decidedly alien manner in which video game characters must necessarily cycle through a list of programmed spoken lines of dialogue; what is presumably a restriction in one medium becomes a liberation in another.

And yet his references to repetition, looping, and trance call to mind something like the works of 1960s structural filmmakers: Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, George Landow, Ernie Gehr, Tony Conrad, and Joyce Wieland committed themselves to a “cinema of structure in which the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape which is the primal impression of the film,… and what content it has is minimal and subsidiary to the outline.”[4] Korine would thus seemingly further align himself with this conception of structural cinema (and other forms of experimental filmmaking) when commenting, in the same Q&A session: “None of us really thought we were making a ‘movie…’ We were trying to make something else. It was closer to, like, an ‘experience…’”[5] In particular, Korine refers to what he terms a ‘liquid narrative’ approach to filmmaking, wherein the “physical component to watching”[6] becomes paramount to spectatorship, narrative eschewed for “the way [watching] it made you feel, [which] I would always describe as a kind of ‘liquid narrative.’”[7] Even as far back as 2013, Korine declared his original intention to approach filmmaking through the lens of a ‘liquid narrative,’ one that he, again, relates to the ontology of video games:

“…We wanted the film [Spring Breakers, 2013] to have this boozy, liquid narrative vibe to it… It was more about capturing this specific energy, something more wild and more closely replicating a drug experience… I think with narrative, if that’s what people are looking for, like a Tom Clancy novel or something, that’s not what I do. I’m not interested in that… I wanted something outside the realm of a traditional narrative film, something more epic, almost like a video game…”[8]

And so it would be just under two years ago when Korine more or less planted his flag for good by stating: “We’re trying to gamify movies. What we’re trying to do is to build some mechanism that allows people to interface with the footage and basically remix, or make their own, films.”[9] AGGRO DR1FT, ostensibly, is the first of such projects, though it is through its game-derived formal inclinations and not (yet) through any spectatorial remixing; Baby Invasion (2024), the second of such projects, recently had its world premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, and its first-person-shooter (FPS) cinematographic perspective and killer-on-a-mission narrative framework bear the markings of traditional first-person-shooter video games, further literalizing Korine’s attempt to ‘gamify’ cinema – even if, again, it is more through purely formal experimentation and not yet the type of interactive interfacing Korine is striving towards.

Nonetheless, in piecing together Korine’s fascination in video game architecture with his more traditionally cinematic experimental/arthouse leanings, one can ultimately conclude that we might, indeed, be entering a new era of the ‘art film,’ one that Korine so succinctly defines as ‘gamecore:’ “What is the feeling of being inside of a game?… Is there a physical kind of component to what you’re watching? Is there something that blurs the line between reality and unreality?”[10] Whether it’s through AGGRO DR1FT’s looping, Grand Theft Auto-esque dialogue or the visual fidelity of a first-person-shooter in Baby Invasion, Korine’s grand conception of ‘gamecore’ necessitates an exploration of just what, exactly, he intends to achieve by ‘gamifying’ cinema, and to what ends this shift – in both its construction and its reception – operate for the ‘art film’ as a whole. It must be noted that this paper represents but a humble beginning of a much larger project; while it will focus largely on the formal aesthetics and narrative inclinations that represent ‘gamification’ of the art film, there are other factors and issues to be investigated in due time, which will be noted at the end.

Of course, there is a sizable question being asked here: What, exactly, constitutes an ‘art film’ in the first place? This very term itself necessitates a brief theoretical outline for, if Korine’s recent works can be said to represent an attempt to force a de-/reconstruction of this mode of filmmaking – a mode informed just as much by formal decisions as by industrial-economic ones – then its very definitional origins must hereby be briefly explored to establish a lineage from its origins to its conceptualization within modern filmmaking. It is crucial to note the term ‘art film’ itself is suggested by some to be inherently problematic; as David Andrews points out, there is no reference to an ‘art novel’ or an ‘art picture’ or ‘art music,’ resulting in its usage that “sounds redundant and almost needy.”[11] But while its nature as a “sprawling cinematic category”[12] remains “nebulous,”[13] the art film nonetheless “exists as a real human perception”[14] and is “useful and desirable, tapping into a very human preference for status and hierarchy, so it is widespread, multiform, and ever changing.”[15]

This suggestion that the ‘art film,’ or ‘art cinema,’ is the product of an audience’s expectations and tastes, thereby shifting in its ontological dimensions over time will be key to an acceptance and understanding of ‘gamecore’ as a type of art film. Nonetheless, these ‘human’-driven dimensions can be traced to a set of objectively observable properties that, perhaps to Andrews’s dismay, I suggest do exist within both the formal and industrial models of Korine’s most two recent films. Contemporary theories of art cinema largely tend to stem from David Bordwell[16] who, in 1979, offered a series of salient features observed in films that were atypical of what he deemed the tradition of “classical narrative cinema”[17]— namely, that of Hollywood studio feature filmmaking[18]—through a set of categorical formal conventions and “implicit” viewing procedures[19] and, in an update nearly 20 years later, the crucial role of institutions such as film schools and festivals in nurturing art cinema.[20] Just as the classical Hollywood film possesses its own distinct formal, narrative, and industrial models by which one can readily observe and understand its cinematic language and engage with particular assumptions and expectations, the “narrative and stylistic principles of [art films] constitute a logically coherent mode of cinematic discourse”[21] as well. Such principles include[22]: a loosening of a cause-effect linkage of events, resulting in an open-ended narrative focused on ambiguity and constructed with a “certain drifting episodic quality;” a narrative informed by “real problems” (though I contend this might be the weakest of Bordwell’s claims, for there are plenty of classically-informed films dealing with “real” problems and, conversely, plenty of art films that arguably do not, though of course the notion of what is a “real” problem and what isn’t needs to be qualified more thoroughly in the first place); characters who lack defined goals and desires and whose choices are “vague or nonexistent;” narratives in which reaction is prioritized over action; and, perhaps most crucially of all, a focus on authorial expressivity, wherein the ‘author’ – here defined by Bordwell as the director – “becomes a formal component, the overriding intelligence organizing the film for our comprehension,… [possessing] a creative freedom denied to his/her Hollywood counterpart.”

In defining the presence of an auteur in an art film, Bordwell points to “recurrent violations of the classical norm” that exist as explicitly formal “deviations” in such areas as cinematography, editing, lighting, and mise-en-scène.[23] Crucially, the presence of an overriding authorial voice demands recognition on the part of the spectator, who “watches the film expecting not order in the narrative but stylistic signatures in the narration: technical touches… and obsessive motifs.”[24] In this way, then, a spectator knowingly engages in a reading of the film’s cinematic language with a certain set of expectations grounded in ambiguity, formal radicalism, and unpredictability, no different from the way in which one approaches the classical Hollywood model with expectations rooted in certainty, formal coherence, and formula; in short, knowledgeable spectators will be drawn to the authorial credence of an art film, supplying a vastly different set of expectations from that of films grounded in a more studio-dominated environment.

This final ‘criterion’ of Bordwell’s is valuable to this paper’s approach to Korine’s films and gamecore more widely, as it implicitly supports the existence of an auteur in the first place by suggesting his recent films share authorial traits with the rest of his corpus; in so doing, I thereby suggest Korine’s label as writer-director is one that exemplifies distinct “technical touches and obsessive motifs,” to quote Bordwell’s earlier criteria, thus giving him both a distinctive ‘authorial expression’ while also crucially allowing for vastly greater ‘creative freedom’ as a pointedly non-Hollywood filmmaking entity with his creative design company, EDGLRD. Nevertheless, such credence to a single authorial voice may well be complicated by his collaboration with digital artists, musicians, and – crucially – artificial intelligence, a complication I well intend to explore more thoroughly in future writing.

The issue of a future technology disrupting traditional models of filmmaking connects to one final crucial note about the ontology of the art film: that the single formal and thematic strand emerging out of the art film’s genesis and continuing to inform its contemporary models today is that of what Howard Finn calls the “aesthetic of cinematic modernism.”[25] Cinematic modernism, a byproduct of postwar philosophies, originally served to “represent an existentialist anxiety about the modern world… [as] a critique of modern society and… its dominant bourgeois values.”[26] The aesthetic of cinematic modernism, Finn suggests, is primarily a response to a “‘crisis of representation’ and an attempt to find new modes of realism… as a means of representing modern life.”[27] Following its history in the films of Fellini, Antonioni, Godard, and Bergman, and echoing the formal and narrative characteristics outlined by Bordwell, Finn points to an aesthetic of cinematic modernism as consisting of such devices as ellipses, fragmentation, spatiotemporal dislocation, open-ended conclusions, unreliable narration, and multiple narrative perspectives – all of which “contribute to a general tendency towards narratives marked by uncertainty and ambiguity.”[28] The suggestion that art cinema is continually engaged in a dialogue with modernist philosophies is reiterated in several other notable works, including Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film (2004), András Bálint Kovács’s Screening Modernism (2007), Sam Rohdie’s Film Modernism (2015), and D.N. Rodowick’s The Crisis of Political Modernism (1994). What is essential, then, is my suggestion that Korine’s works represent yet another response to modernism by directly addressing our contemporary ‘crisis of representation’ through the amalgamation of cinematic and video game language in approaching a ‘new mode of realism’ that Finn refers to. For Korine, the aesthetic of cinematic modernism is a form of realism that is vehemently at odds with those of classical cinematic principles while forcing a reconsideration of what actually constitutes ‘art cinema’ to shift the focus away from postwar European existentialism. If the narrative branches of art films have historically been rooted in existentialist anguish over the modern world’s way of living, and Korine’s films represent two of filmmakers’ deepest existentialist fears today – the usage of generative AI in films, and the diminishing of cinema’s distinct medium specificity – then would these works not also fulfill this final criterion of the art film?

By establishing a topography of art cinema, Bordwell originally sought to push scholarship and spectatorship beyond their ‘traditional’ methodological frameworks to classify the art film as a recognizable mode of filmmaking whose nonconformity to classical Hollywood cinema traditions necessitated a nonconformity to theorizing about cinema itself. This paper similarly encourages nonconformity in how scholars theorize the art film by recognizing the influence of video game language and vice versa. In turn, this will also recognize the validity in approaching film theories through an interdisciplinary lens, a recognition that new approaches to filmmaking demand new approaches to spectatorship, research, and pedagogy.

In outlining a theoretical definition of the ‘art film’ proper, we can now begin to contextualize its properties that are in dialogue with those of video game aesthetics. There are numerous methodological frameworks used within games and transmedia studies to define the ontology of ‘video games’ proper; this essay will not explore at any serious length what ‘is’ or ‘is not’ a video game, nor will it dive into the various ontological definitions of video games themselves – this requires a far longer exploration into the modal properties of various mediums than room currently allows for. I will nonetheless suggest from the outset that the mediums of video games and cinema can be examined as disparate artforms through their unique spectatorial mechanics (ex.: video games: active spectatorship; cinema: passive spectatorship) and narrative mechanics (ex.: video games: branching and susceptible to change through user input; cinema: unidirectional and immutable). And so, in attempting to explore Korine’s (still roughly-defined) conception of cinematic ‘gamification,’ one must necessarily first look towards the very ideas of just what sort of formal and narrative characteristics seem to justify the very existence of an overall video game ‘aesthetic,’ ‘style,’ or ‘form’ whose uniquely medium-specific properties can be observed, categorized, and isolated for deployment across other mediums. Before turning to the theoretical frameworks observing such characteristics, we can first think upon this question a bit more simply by highlighting two popular and well-recognized examples of creative movements whose formal properties evidence a discrete video game language.

The first is a musical genre known as chiptune, whose distinctively 8-bit[29] ‘retro’ sound is rooted in the style of early video game soundtracks that were written in machine code and then reproduced in real time by a sound chip commonly known as a programmable sound generator (PSG) using short, single-cycle samples of synthetic waveforms.[30] Because PSGs consisted of “usually only a few channels of polyphony and a prescriptive palette of simple waveforms,”[31] musical expression was limited; and yet, because of these technical limitations, developer-composers (composer-developers?) found themselves at the doorstep of “musical possibilities that lay waiting to be explored and perhaps transformed.”[32] What resulted from this minimalist creative-technical framework was a wave of artistic ingenuity and resourcefulness as developers learned to program and generate a range of music that surpassed the hardware’s original capabilities; this burst of creativity allowed for an exploration and condensation of the unique characteristics of the ‘chip sound,’ characteristics that ultimately came to define the aesthetic of the 8-bit computer soundtrack[33] and its contemporary applications in the chiptune music scene. While one can point to several likely reasons for the popularity of chiptune music, – nostalgia certainly chief among them, but a topic better reserved for a separate discussion – it is the element of constraint-as-creativity that is relevant here, for it seems to suggest an ongoing engagement with remix culture that continues to pervade various mediums such as music, cinema, and fashion: the activity of taking samples from preexisting materials to combine them into new forms.[34] And while chiptune might not be a literal sampling of licensed tracks that are recombined into new forms of musical expression à la DJs and turntablism, its mode of output nonetheless advocates the exploration of a singular formal model which defines the piece as a whole. Korine’s recent cinematic inclinations would thus very much appear to fall into this creative framework, utilizing two functionally-limiting aesthetic palettes that, as a result, become entirely distinctive unto themselves.

The second example of a categorically-defined video game aesthetic, ‘pixel art,’ – chiptune’s visual art equivalent of ‘retro,’ 8-bit form and nostalgia – mirrors the style of 1980s- and 1990s-produced video games in which each pixel is visible on screen and is placed intentionally by the developers.[35] Now, quickly: think of a traditional, popular 8-bit video game character. It’s probably safe to surmise that most of those currently reading this will have immediately thought of a) Mario, b) Donkey Kong, or c) Pac-Man (or, for the less gaming-inclined, nobody at all), and those conceptions would be correct; curves are angular, lines are jagged, and you can identify each individual pixel in these iconic characters who represent the quintessential ‘pixel art’ aesthetic. Part of the distinctiveness of these characters stems from the element of exaggeration, whereby features become “somewhat iconic versions of whatever they are intended to represent.”[36] Arguably among the most influential and recognized game developers of all time, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto offers an example of this key feature: “With the technology back then, you had a very limited palette in which you were able to draw a character… My goal within that limited palette was to create a character that was as distinct as possible. Because of that, he had some of his now-distinct features such as his big nose.”[37] It is interesting to note Miyamoto’s preface that Mario’s recognizability was the product of technical limitations, for it is here where we can begin to understand the more salient connections between chiptune and pixel art, gaming and cinema, and the intersectionality of technical limitations, creative exploration, and formal distinctiveness (exaggeration). For it can be similarly posited that chiptune music also gives way to a distinct exaggeration of its own sonic properties due to technical limitations; after all, why else do we instinctively utilize such common onomatopoeias like ‘bleep’ and ‘bloop’ to describe the form of such soundtracks? Like chiptune, pixel art’s form was born out of technical constraints, here the result of artists working on computers with minimal memory (8-bit consoles typically having 256 bytes of RAM), whose confined pixel dimensions forced restrictions on such features as size and colour.[38] And, like those early PSG soundtracks, pixel art allowed artists to wield a surprising amount of creative exploration; making the most of very little, artists soon discovered ‘best practices’ that would come to define pixel art in universum as it is today.[39]

This (very) brief examination of chiptune music and pixel art highlights two popular examples of game form that, while far from being exhaustive, nonetheless typify several important transmedial properties, including restriction and exaggeration, that will come to help define the ‘gamecore’ art film. Before examining this approach in Korine’s recent works, it is vital to momentarily outline some theoretical underpinnings of video game formalism itself that guide and inform the current research; as with formalist film theory, the emphasis here is (chiefly) on the medium’s aesthetic properties. Alex Mitchell and Jasper van Vught crucially suggest that “videogame formalism is not so much interested in what a videogame means but rather in how a videogame works to trigger an aesthetic experience… Form is always foregrounded and understood through the aesthetic experience of the player… [It is] a starting point for exploration of how videogames evoke experience.”[40] This focus on phenomenology and spectatorship will be crucial to our own understanding of how gamecore’s own formal mechanics operate, as they ostensibly seek to prioritize heightened experiences of viscerality within viewers in service of reduced – or, borrowing Korine’s terminology, ‘liquid’ – narratives. Zach Jurgensen similarly approaches video game formalism through the medium’s capacity to elicit palpable, emotional responses within users, while suggesting that it is able to do so largely by way of its transmedial nature: “Specifically, videogames have the ability to evoke emotional responses much in the same way other art forms do… Often, game designers use various mediums employed in other artworks to create fictions to which we have genuine emotional responses.”[41] Aaron Smuts utilizes a comparative approach to cinema to emphasize this point by suggesting that “game designers often try to make their games look more like a film by including cut scenes and imitating other cinematic features,”[42] while Grant Tavinor also argues that video games engage with spectatorial emotion in a way that crosses over with other mediums.[43] (A ‘cut scene’ refers to any moment in a video game during which there is a clear transition from active, ludic gameplay to passive spectatorship, typically demarcated by shifts toward ‘cinematic’ form that, in essence, act as a ‘break’ in the gameplay. These shifts are marked by such elements as the removal of player control and agency, an emphasis on narrative and exposition, and traditionally ‘filmic’ cinematography that moves away from a player-/character-centered camera and towards fundamental aspects of cinematic language we are familiar with, i.e., close-up shots, zooms, pans, tilts, dolly shots, establishing shots, shot/reverse-shot patterns, and so forth.)

It is fascinating to note how, just as video games have looked to cinematic formal conventions for meaning-making and spectatorial empathy, filmmakers such as Korine are returning the gaze in looking to gaming’s own uniquely medium-specific properties for inspiration. Furthermore, it is vital to note the focus on video games’ observance to generating a highly tactile, palpable, and visceral response in users, for it is this key criterion that also motivates Korine’s recent works; recall his earlier quotes wherein he describes his focus on exploring “a physical kind of component to what you’re watching” and “the feeling of being inside of a game.” Having briefly established the methodological and theoretical frameworks informing this research, we can now engage in textual analysis of Korine’s two most recent films in an attempt to gauge how effective he is in exploring these questions of a decidedly phenomenological bent. Do they successfully trigger feelings in the viewer’s subconscious, those of a physiological sort that bypass narrative coherence and logical reasoning? Through what formal mechanisms does Korine attempt to achieve this? And what is the relationship between the formal sensibilities of gamecore and those of art film and avant-garde filmic traditions such as the structural and lyrical films?

This investigation will begin with Korine’s latest work, Baby Invasion (whose exhibition, as of now, has been relegated to such festival screenings as Venice and Fantastic Fest). It is immediately telling of Korine’s aims to erase the medium-specific boundaries between cinema and gaming, reality and unreality when reading the film’s synopsis as part of the official press release published at the Venice Film Festival: “Baby Invasion is a new ultra-realistic, multiplayer FPS game following a group of mercenaries using baby faces as avatars to conceal their identity. Tasked with entering mansions of the rich and powerful and leaving nothing behind, players must explore every rabbit hole before time runs out. Original score by Burial.”[44] Unlike most traditional synopses that demarcate the film as a film proper by typically providing such information as characters (and their respective performers) and referring to the diegetic world as separate from that of our own, Korine here eschews any references to fictionality, diegesis, or film whatsoever; in so doing, viewers are suddenly compelled to now approach Baby Invasion not just as a piece of fiction that represents a new reality, but as that new reality itself – thus representing another way to approach modernity’s ‘crisis of representation.’ This is accomplished with but a simple adjustment to rhetoric: instead of the film being about a “new… FPS game,” the film simply is the game; instead of approaching this as a film-about-a-game or a game-within-a-film, Korine establishes viewer expectations to engage with the text as a film that is also a game. There is no longer an established boundary between the diegesis of the film and that of the game in the film – a key characteristic, I suggest, of the gamecore art film itself, and one that Korine pursues through a variety of formal and narrative mechanics.

Operating to this end is the film’s rabbit-hole, world-in-a-world narrative framework that aims to rupture the boundaries between multiple fictional diegeses within the film while simultaneously making them bleed into that of our own lived-in, non-diegetic world. Alison Willmore suggests that the “screen-within-a-screen-within-a-screen set-up,” in which the narrative flits between the settings of the real-world, a livestream feed of a teenager on his computer, and the perspective of a user in the game itself, “becomes unclear which parts of what we’re watching are meant to be real, and which are taking place in a computer.”[45] Jordan Mintzer similarly concludes that Baby Invasion “[breaks] the barriers between cinema and video games until we no longer know if we’re watching one or the other,” pointing to one specific formal technique in which “onscreen titles come up at some point saying: ‘This is not a movie. This is a game. This is real life. There is no real life.’”[46] Finally, Peter Debruge also proposes that the film “blurs the lines between real life and a gnarly video game, so much so that it’s hard to tell what we’re watching for most of the trippy project’s 79-minute running time.”[47] One might immediately interject that the supposed medium-specific mechanics of gaming – including rule-based gameplay, user agency, and interactivity – render such arguments pointless, as Baby Invasion is clearly an example of a film integrating the aesthetics of a video game and is not a video game proper. But, recall Mitchell and van Vught’s earlier clarification that video game formalism engages with how a spectator feels; to that end, we can bypass any ontological incongruity by suggesting that these comments refer to the feeling of not knowing whether what one is experiencing is a film or a game, as opposed to truly not knowing whether what one is experiencing is a film or a game.

This spectatorial response – this “physical component to watching,” as earlier defined by Korine – of a sort of dislocated unreality towards the filmic image itself is achieved through a number of formal techniques uniquely rooted in gaming architecture. Debruge suggests that both AGGRO DR1FT and Baby Invasion “[try] to port the logic and visual language of video games over to film… Where other filmmakers have almost universally embraced photoreal, slow-to-render digital effects, Korine has turned to ultra-fast graphic cards and real-time rendering technology, distorting the footage as it was being captured. In both Baby Invasion and Aggro Dr1ft, the effect is alternately distancing and uniquely immersive… as Korine channels the grammar of gaming.”[48] Arguably among the most significant instances of gaming syntax is observed in Baby Invasion: that of the first-person perspective used for much of its duration. This camera angle, similar to its function in cinema, typically signals an instantiation of the user being forced to experience the diegetic world through a subjective point-of-view (POV) of the in-game character. It should be noted that, while the first-person perspective exists across a range of genres – such as in the puzzle games of the Myst (1993–present) franchise or the role-playing games (RPGs) of The Elder Scrolls (1994–present) series – this research will largely engage with the first-person shooter genre, as this is Korine’s most obvious and direct referent within the film. It should also be noted that this is not the first film to formally depict the immediacy and action of first-person shooters through a subjective perspective: Andrzej Bartkowiak’s Doom (2005), a film adaptation of the titular sci-fi FPS game series (1993–present), is famous for its sequence in which the third-person perspective suddenly and briefly shifts to a first-person POV shot through its main character (played by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson), during which the viewer is meant to viscerally experience the shooting of monsters as opposed to watching it from a ‘detached’ viewpoint. Ilya Naishuller’s Hardcore Henry (2015) takes this concept further by forcing the viewer to experience the entire film through the perspective of its titular main character, whose ever-present, gun-wielding hands are just one among a number of mechanics mirroring the formal language of FPS games. Both of these films can, and should, be considered examples of works that made earlier strides in pursuit of the type of cinematic ‘gamification’ Korine seems to seek. Furthermore, this is a prime example of game form’s tradition of restriction and exaggeration appearing across mediums: by restricting the viewer’s perspective, the depiction of the filmic world itself becomes exaggerated, with a prioritization of kineticism not normally associated with the ubiquity of third-person perspectives in cinema.

Whereas third-person games depict the player-character as a complete graphical model, first-person shooters differ in that the virtual camera represents the player-character’s eyes, who is generally only otherwise depicted with a set of limbs holding a weapon. Significantly, research in game studies currently suggests that players of first-person shooters – particularly those that allow for character customization of appearance and style – demonstrate a higher identification with their in-game characters[49], further strengthened by multisensory applications of stereo sound and tactile feedback via rumble and force-feedback controllers.[50] The key difference between Korine’s film and a traditional first-person shooter, of course, is the lack of user control and interactivity – his desire to eventually work towards this sort of spectator-cum-user interactivity notwithstanding. What is nonetheless important, however, is his command of the genre’s formal language to create the sort of ‘physical experience’ he seeks to elicit within spectators while exploring the fundamental questions of artifice/reality and the phenomenology of ‘being inside’ a video game. This visceral response is noted by Willmore in her discussion of the film’s formally maximalist nature that “marries a first-person perspective to a barrage of other visual noise on screen, including icons, pop-ups, picture-in-picture, and a chat overlay, all accompanied by a throbbing non-stop score,” the “sensorily overwhelming” experience causing her to “stagger” out of the theatre and “prop [herself] up against a wall for a while with [her] eyes closed.”[51] In a similar vein, Reyna Cervantes describes her experience watching the film with violently somatic terms, in that it “feels icky,” and whose visuals “feel like an assault of the senses” [emphasis added].[52] And like earlier responses to the film’s non-cinematic properties, she suggests that “much like Aggro Dr1ft before it, Baby Invasion really isn’t a movie you watch. It’s an experience you subject your eyes and brain to.”[53]

AGGRO DR1FT, to this end, similarly ports over the visual language of gaming to heighten the viewer experience of ‘being in a game,’ even without the need for a first-person perspective. Erik Morse accurately sums up its gamecore sensibilities thusly: “The protean narrative and shadowy characters ebb and flow within the panchromatic spectacle of the film, which is shot entirely with high resolution infrared cameras and uses gaming engines, 3D technology, and artificial intelligence to render detailed forms like faces, tattoos, masks and costumes. The result is a hyperreal, liquid world that subsists in the liminal optics between live action and a digitally generated cutscene.”[54] While perhaps not a reflection of restriction in game aesthetics, it is undoubtedly an instance of exaggeration, the natural world turned to fuzzy blotches of neon hues while characters’ facial features cartoonishly shift and distort unto themselves. Nonetheless, the usage of AI and game engines for visual rendering is paramount in both films; Korine, again, explains that this represents “kind of a first attempt, to figure out what’s it like to live in a game, to let it wash through you… something that feels like audiovisual drugs – that allows you to enter the image and the sound.”[55] The suggestion, then, is that if gamecore is going to emulate the fluidity, elasticity, and uncanniness of a video game’s formal environment, it must necessarily do so by way of the very technologies used to develop games in the first place. And if a gamecore film can achieve this sort of _un_cinematic reality it seeks to construct, then the goal of eliciting a primal, physical spectatorial experience becomes that much more obtainable.

But what does it even mean to experience a film as opposed to merely watching it? This is the sort of phenomenology one can spend a lifetime researching, so while we won’t presently arrive at any real grand truth, any real capital-A Answer, we can at least look at the collection of experiential responses to the film as perhaps being representative of Korine’s devotion to his ‘liquid narrative’ approach to cinema. While elements such as cinematography, music, and visual effects act as formal referents to the language of video games, it is through a liquid narrative structure that they generate – and are given – meaning. Korine has attempted to describe this concept in various terms: “elliptical,”[56] “loop-based,” “sample-based,” “micro-scenes,” “sensory,” “hallucinatory,” “about a feeling,” “akin to a drug experience,” “freeform narrative,” “about harnessing energy,” “momentum,” and, ultimately, “beyond articulation.”[57] Korine is effectively trying to use the language of art cinema proper to describe his aims, but seems to desire a greater push towards transmedial filmmaking while more explicitly using the formal language of video games; in examining liquid narrative, AGGRO DR1FT offers a revealing look into the wider structural aims of gamecore.

As observed earlier, there is no traditional plot with acts or arcs, no character development or cause-and-effect logic; there is only a central character, BO, who we mostly follow and come to understand as embarking upon an assassination mission, and who is often depicted gunning down nameless henchmen (from a quasi-first-person view, typically just above and behind his shoulder and close to the ear) as a player-character would vanquish enemies in an FPS game. Characters speak past one another, not to each other, repeating elliptical, mantra-like phrases. And when not following BO, Korine largely weaves together a sort of impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness-like tapestry of imagery that is detached from the central action but operates as world-building and mood-setting – think the tone poem imagery of Terrence Malick but set in Florida with strippers and balaclava-wearing, AK-47-wielding criminals. This narrative framework, guided by a loose set of objectives the main character must follow and carry out in sequence, mirrors that which is found in nearly all FPS games[58], wherein the player-character sets out on a quest to vanquish some sort of malevolent being through physical violence. It is worth noting that this is not the Joseph Campbell-esque Hero’s Journey we embark upon; unlike those figures, there is generally little that the FPS hero learns about him- or herself through the course of completing their murderous goals, nor is there the typical return to home during which both character and spectator can gauge any emotional/cognitive/behavioural developments in our hero over the course of their quest. Alberto Oya instead argues that the traditional FPS narrative is set in what he terms a “heroic light,”[59] in which the player-character is presented as being the only individual who can successfully defeat the game’s villain(s); to this end, it is no longer about free will, but simply about fulfilling one’s duty.[60] Crucially, Oya suggests, this exemplifies the FPS game’s emphasis on spectacle over narrative, for traditional stories in these games are not a major factor for an “immersive gaming experience.”[61] Immersiveness, then, appears to be a central spectatorial response we return to in reading Korine’s liquid narrative aims, as the viewer inhabits BO’s own heroic light even without more literally embodying it through a first-person perspective, divorced from any form of character backstory or internal development; the goal-oriented, spectacle-driven design of FPS games here becomes the narrative architecture of gamecore.

In concluding this brief overview of gamecore, it is valuable to pivot away from game theory and, as was initially proposed, towards those of arthouse and avant-garde cinema in tracing its historical antecedent; in particular, I suggest that gamecore is a modern-day iteration of, namely, structuralist and lyrical cinema traditions. In his landmark text on American avant-garde cinema, P. Adams Sitney points to Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) as being the “roots of first-person cinematic consciousness.”[62] The lyrical film, like the structural film, “replaces the mediator with the increased presence of the camera”[63] and “postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film;”[64] whether literalized through a POV shot or conveyed through impressionistic montage, both of Korine’s films seek to induce a first-person spectatorial experience, inhabiting the position of both character and author (Korine) himself. Furthermore, instead of a traditional narrative, “the screen is filled with movement, and that movement, both of the camera and the editing, reverberates with the idea of a person looking”[65] – again, recalling Korine’s dedication to form that emphasizes, in his words, ‘energy’ and ‘momentum.’ And finally, the lyrical film exists “outside sequential time in a realm of simultaneity or of disconnected time spans of isolated events”[66] – much in the way both AGGRO DR1FT and Baby Invasion treat time and space discordantly, fluidly weaving between the Virtual and the Real, Present and the Future. The lyrical film, then, ultimately works towards this end by transcending the boundary between fantasy and reality by moving into the cinema of “triumphant imagination”[67] while “[affirming] the physicality of the film material.”[68]

Like the lyrical film, the structural film also prioritizes its own materiality but instead makes this the predominant criterion of its raison d’être; crucially, what results is a “conscious ontology of the viewing experience”[69] on the part of the spectator. In his original conception of the structural film, Sitney outlined four of its major characteristics: fixed camera position, flicker effect, loop printing, and re-photography off the screen.[70] Perhaps we can offer similar formal characteristics of gamecore films: fixed character-focused perspectives, visual fidelity to game engines (even created by game engines), looping dialogue and music, and AI-generated imagery? In any case, by foregrounding its own form – whether the celluloid of film or the digital pixels of game engines and AI – structuralism and gamecore share a desire to question the nature of the image as it represents or depicts reality for the viewer. And in disrupting traditional spatiotemporal boundaries of fiction/reality, we also locate gamecore’s affinities with the lyrical film, itself indebted to its own representation of filmic materiality. Gamecore, then, would currently seem to share as much with the historical traditions of arthouse and avant-garde cinema as it does with those of video games, complicating Korine’s desire to perhaps ever fully divorce himself from the formalism of cinema.

This paper represents a mere preface to a topic whose research must keep up with the rapidity with which gamecore films will be released; if Korine’s current annual output is any indication, the accelerated workflow that gaming and AI technologies allow for, along with the immediacy of web-based distribution models, will soon cause a rapid influx of gamecore art films as filmmakers become more familiar with its technology – and as long as the technology itself is widely accessible to filmmakers in the first place. Among other topics to be explored or expanded upon in the near future include: the ontology and phenomenology of video games and cinema; Korine’s desire to let viewers ‘remix’ his films (gamecore and remix culture); the implications of conflating ‘high’ (cinema) and ‘low’ (gaming) culture; the implications of the gaming industry’s profitability and of adopting its demographics; and gamecore’s place within the larger landscape of new media as it pertains to the intersection of gaming, cinema, livestreaming, social media platforms, and content creation tools such as TikTok. This paper has chiefly examined gamecore through some of its more salient formal properties as represented by one of its self-proclaimed practitioners, illustrating only one of many methodological approaches one can take in approaching its reconceptualization of the ‘art film.’ Regardless, I have here offered an immediate and obvious starting point from which to begin larger theoretical and philosophical discussions of gamecore proper.

Describing his fixation on “post-cinema” and conceiving of what comes “after movies,” Korine believes it’s “all pretty much gonna be obliterated.”[71] It remains to be seen just how Baby Invasion’s wider release will endeavour to seek destruction or harmony in the film industry: Korine envisions a version which is “constantly remixing itself and [allowing] people to remix it,”[72] while also including codes that will take viewers to “three or four other sub films,” remarking that Baby Invasion only represents the “base layer.”[73] How we watch, produce, and discuss art films continues to transform with incredible rapidity, and gamecore might arguably be at the forefront of tracking – and eliciting – these changes.