MUBI

With this film, Gus van Sant depicts the Columbine High School massacre in his death trilogy beginning with Gerry and ending with Last Days. The disclaimer at the end of the film is, if to be taken literally, untrue. Names are changed but the teenagers in the film are non-professional actors portraying the victims or survivors of the incident to a point.

Elephant works beautifully as a reflection on teenage insecurity, without indulging in infringing the privacy of those involved. We follow the students as they do whatever they like, they get bullied, they meet their friends and argue or laugh. It is an insight into the high school and gives us no answers as to why the slaughter occurs towards the end of the film. Who is morally good, who is amoral? Who has more of a disregard for others, the bullies or the bullied? The director generously gives us the film and lets us decide, it is our personal piece to reflect upon. It is everybody’s piece to reflect on. Discussion can be provoked from what is filmed because there is no bias, the murder is shown realistically and not exploitatively. We view impending death and it haunts us.

Elephant mirrors the 1989 Alan Clarke short film of the same name, the camera following (I want to say elegantly) teens as they cross eachother in school. It is an exciting way of filmmaking, but it is terrifying because we know what will happen and we know it cannot be prevented. Can things like this really be avoided?

The fact that the media blamed ‘goth culture’ and ‘violent video games’ disturbs me more than how ‘disturbed’ the killers were. When the film fades to a shot of the clouds above , I thought rather sentimentally: ‘what is most important is love.’

Because the noughties have come and gone, I am trying to revisit all the Palme d’Or winners of the past decade. I started with my most favourite Cannes winner of them all, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, the middle film of his Death trilogy. Elephant, which is a fictionalized reimagination of the Columbine Massacre, follows the lives of ordinary students in a fictional high school as it culminates in a disturbing and devastating conclusion.

This film is extraordinary because it successfully evokes a simultaneous feeling of sympathy and helplessness for the characters as they do about with their regular affairs minutes before the shooting. Elephant thus gives a human face to all students who die in school shootings. Viewers can finally realize that these dead students are not just statistics to be forgotten but are people who have touched lives and whose lives have been touched.

The characters were richly developed by following the ordinary and mundane nature of everyday high school life, a life that was soon to be rocked to its core by the disturbing resolution. A different perspective for each character was used. A scene will follow one character. Another scene will follow another character. There are scenes where characters meet but these were done several times in different points of view. All in all, the direction and cinematography was majestic as Van Sant goes all Bela Tarr on us by using long uninterrupted tracking shots to evoke realism. Its use of bright autumn colors, with yellow being the most prominent, is a sort of antidote to the blackening poison that is its denouement. However, the ubiquity of long haunting corridors is a constant reminder of its darker theme.

Because I know the premise of the film, there is a sense of foreboding of things to come. In a way, this sense of fatalistic doom is actually the hook of the film itself. Still, there is something in me that tries to temporarily forget the sad situation that will eventually happen. This is much like the saying “elephant in the room,” the idiom that is the pervading theme of Elephant. It is a metaphor for the gun problem in America – which has caused a lot of deaths but is still just being brushed off by politicians and ordinary citizens alike.

Overall, Elephant is a marvelous pièce de résistance for Gus Van Sant. What he explored superficially in some of his inferior films, like interconnectivity and lack of communication, he explores more deeply in this film. Elephant may have polarizing reactions from the viewers but these come from the same thing – its lasting impact.

In Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, there are no easy answers. The film is not about finding answers or reasoning an incomprehensible tragedy; that would be hubristic. No one has answers, and Van Sant doesn’t claim any different. Rather, his film is about observing. It’s about confronting life and all that it contains square in the face, not sweeping it under the rug. There can never be a satisfactory explanation for an event as horrible as a school shooting, but while we shouldn’t look for an explanation, we should strive for more attention, understanding and empathy, everywhere in life.

Van Sant brings his audience closer to understanding and empathy through observation. He and his fine cinematographer Harris Savides foreground the audience’s duty to watch, patiently and meticulous documenting the route of his characters in bravura long-takes. The first character we follow (some students are introduced via title cards) is John, a sensitive and thoughtful boy. We watch his drunk father pick him up for school. We see John make a phone call, encounter the principal, walk down a hallway, and more; events both meaningful and mundane.

For Van Sant, no detail is insignificant. A football pass is just as important as pistol blast, and both are observed with the same detachment. We are meant to see all, to open our eyes to things too easy to disregard in real life, and this same moral dedication to unflinching observation keeps the film from ever feeling exploitative or sensationalistic. From the beginning, the film focuses clearly on people and their minutest actions. Things all seem very normal, but Van Sant wisely tips his cards early, briefly showing the killers enter school and hinting that this day will be anything but normal.

As the day proceeds, events are repeated, shown from different perspectives. Van Sant deftly weaves together the lives of his characters, but their crossings never feel gimmicky or coincidental because they are no more important than any other detail of the day. The shifting perspectives and crosscutting between moments in time serves the dual purpose of building suspense and showing off a fully-realized world, teeming with life. The use of non-professional actors, improvised dialogue and shooting on location at a school in Portland lend further credibility to the reality of the film. It’s all too recognizable from real life, and this realism forces us to confront the horror ready to explode.

The largest sequence away from school unfolds at Alex’s home. He and his friend Eric, the two killers, spend the afternoon lazing around and almost dispassionately initiating their plan. Despite a more confined setting, Van Sant shoots these scenes like the rest of the film, capturing Alex’s environment in long takes. One shot slowly spins around Alex’s bedroom as he plays Beethoven on the piano. It seems like a normal high schooler’s room: the bed is unmade, some dirty clothes are strewn about the room. On one wall hangs a drawing of an elephant.

The scene again demonstrates Van Sant’s compassion and commitment to observing everything and forcing the viewer to decide what’s important. Critics of the film have pointed to this sequence as hinting at possible motives for the killing. Many of the popular explanations advanced in the wake of the Columbine shooting are present: the boys play violent videogames, surf the Web for guns, and idly watch a documentary about Nazism. Alex’s parents seem distant; their faces are never shown. Since there’s no editorializing, many have questioned the inclusion of such details. The key, however, is that Van Sant is not presenting these as true causes to the killings, but as red herrings. He’s simply playing lip service to our futile attempts at rationalizing teenage violence. As he has shown all along, through both the form and content of the film, these clues are simply details, just a few of the myriad events that make up this particular day.

Soon, the inevitable event begins. The violence is indeed graphic—Van Sant refuses to shy away from anything—but it is documented with the same grace and calm as the rest of the film. Some central characters live, others die, but like in real life, these outcomes are determined by chance, not by the machinations of a scriptwriter. The fates of the characters do not neatly fit into a standard narrative. In Elephant there are no answers. Sometime during the mayhem of the film’s climax, Eric is asked why he’s doing what he’s doing. We are whisked away to another part of school before returning to Eric: “…you know there’s others out there like us, too.” We don’t hear his explanation, only his threat of more violence. In a film built so meticulously around observation, this explanation is perhaps the only thing Van Sant consciously, conveniently overlooks.

Gus Van Sant has made some pretty good movies so far in his career, like Milk and Good Will Hunting, but I believe that this film about Columbine is his best. The film is not directly about Columbine, but it doesn’t matter because the movie concerns many of the same events. It’s a movie that is incredibly hard to watch for two reasons; it is incredibly slow movie and it depicts senseless murders that actually happened. The entire movie feels like it’s all just one long take, the longest single shot being six minutes long without a cut. The movie depicts an average day for about ten or so high school students, every event taking place during the same fifteen minutes. This allows for the audience to connect with the characters as they roam through their lives like actual students, and when the killing begins to start the fact that these students feel like real people causes the murders to be much harder to watch.

The long steadicam shots are wonderful and make the viewer feel like an actual spectator at the school, walking through the halls following the students around. Although I love these shots, to many viewers this will make the film boring as nothing really happens during these scenes. The entire film is just showing the students’ average day at school and is incredibly effective, especially when the viewer knows what tragedy will soon take place. When the shooting is about to occur I was wondering how these character’s we’ve followed the entire movie will play into the event, yet everything happens incredibly fast, most of the characters killed in passing. The violence is not glorified and is actually terrifying to watch, incredibly suspenseful and intense.

I had a few problems with this film though, especially the ending. The movie ends with the killer Eric cornering two of the main character’s in a freezer. The movie ends here and I stare at the screen wishing for a resolution or for one of the other supporting characters to enter the room and save the day. This movie left me unfulfilled and with a bad taste in my mouth, absolutely shocked by what I had witnessed. This film didn’t need a happy ending, but it did need an ending. The other problem I had with this film is that Eric practices his shooting by playing an absolutely horrible videogame on his computer. It looks like crap, even by 90s standards, and is ridiculously over the top, the games only objective to stand in an open white area shooting pedestrians.

Despite its flaws I found Elephant to be an incredibly powerful film. The title refers to two possible meanings; one being that people can never notice an obvious problem, and the other is that an entire story will always be missing information when being told by certain characters. This somewhat makes the open ending reasonable, as the story can’t continue passed the boundaries of our characters’ perspectives. The movie is incredibly powerful and I thought of it as an incredibly powerful film that depicted school shootings without being stylized or glorified. Its an abruptly disturbing film and tells a powerful and gripping story, although it is very slow moving. Elephant is the best movie to ever try to depict a subject as terrifying and taboo as school shootings.

Rating: 8/10

Gus van Sant has written, directed and edited this film, that delves into the lives of high-school youths. It is all based on the American Columbine massacre committed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. As usual, van Sant lets the lives of the characters lead the direction rather than him forcing something, which never happens in this film. For me, not even the intense physical violence overpowers the feeling of natural lives being lived throughout this film. Some people slack off at school, others take pictures, some murder. I can clearly see how some critics may dislike this film entirely; the languid atmosphere is at times a little taxing even for me, though I mostly really like van Sant’s direction; what seems hypnotic can lead into the lax and boring. Some might call this playing it safe, but all in all I like this non-Hollywood-esque film, which I shelf below films like “Paranoid Park” and “My Own Private Idaho” but above so much else by many other film-makers.

Van Sant’s long unbroken tracking shots, most commonly following a student from behind as he or she walks down long, labyrinthine school corridors, becomes the skillfully slow-burning motif of this hypnotic yet strangely unsatisfying film. It is clear that he has absolutely no intention of delving into personal psychology or even character development, but rather to create a dim, eventless portrait of an extraordinarily mundane day at school that unwittingly shuffles into senseless violence. Quiet, placid, words heard but rarely acknowledged, muffled conversations hazily blending into one another, it is an experiment of intolerable stillness and lethargic mood building, shooting with effectively drawn-out shots that seem to last as long as the creeping ebb and flow of high school life. As effective as the storytelling is, the concept is thinly conceived and often meandering. In simply presenting the fact with a no-nonsense ambition, the ideas are potent, if not entirely accomplished.

This film went in no particular direction. Don’t get me wrong, it’s shot beautifully (in some scenes at least) and the blocking is excellent, and it was intriguing to watch how the focus was pulled, but I didn’t learn or feel anything. It wasn’t in depth enough to be a character study; it wasn’t complicated or long enough to explain anything about the shooters, and the swastikas and ridiculous ‘video game’ that they played were hackneyed stereotypes that conjure up personal feelings that have nothing to do with the film or the characters. The kids didn’t even know what they were watching. “Who’s that, that one’s Hitler, right?”

Although the “acting” wasn’t as atrocious as it was in Paranoid Park, only one of the characters was interesting at all to me, and that was Elias – who I later found out was quite literally just the actor himself going through his own (mind you, incorrect) development process of 35mm black and white film that he told Gus on set he does as a hobby; even that ‘personal’ touch can’t be attributed to Van Sant. It wasn’t based on a specific true story, so it doesn’t have the nobility or respect of trying to teach us something about what happened in the past or give us insight into true psychosis. It wasn’t written to explore the interactions between high schoolers for more than a 10 or so minute time period. The dialogue is shallow, weak, and repetitive based on what calm, gentile, happy, middle-American people and the media would come up with while trying to discuss “what would a troubled kid sound like” … “ooh he’d be detached and have fun shooting people because of evil videogames.”

Watching footage from production, the kids run around joking and Van Sant simply emotionally explores the set while longingly smiling at the children. That’s what this film is about, how Gus Van Sant feels about violence in America 6 years ago. Nothing more and nothing less. According to the synopsis it is supposed to be about an area of privilege, and yet no indicators (aside from a drunk father who is not at some occupation/work) make their way onto the screen. We don’t learn enough about the killers to sympathize with them (since Van Sant hides behind minimalism so that we think he’s making an artistic statement, when in fact he has no understanding of violence and the ‘motivation’ or causes behind it) and we don’t know little enough to despise them. It seems as if he wanted to show a couple kids that may or may not represent a few different cliques in high school, but the only way we would care as an audience or not dare to criticize the filmmaking is by using the taboo subject at the time, school shootings. Anyone that didn’t like it right off the bad would be a horrible person. Let’s throw the Palm d’Or at it to prove that we stand against violence.

If you want to see a film about a school shooting, watch POLYTECHNIQUE. When screened in Cannes this year, the entire theater (in the Palais Stéphanie) instantly fell silent, was gripped during the entire 76 minute film, and gave a standing ovation at the end. The actors and the directors were crying and many members of the audience had tears and makeup running down their cheeks. Not only is the film based on a true event (that occurred in 1989), but we learn more about not only the perpetrator but also several students during the incident, as well as afterwards. We see much more of the gut-wrenching, believable, and unexpected violence instead of one or two squibs strapped to the back of a cute teenager – as is the case with Elephant. The true story of Polytechnique continues after the first have of the film to follow those whose lives were effected permanently after the shootings and explores how different people deal with tragedy. Elephant ends with an unconvincing trucking-out shot of the “popular kids” not even begging put politely asking for “the shooter” to not “do it” and stating unenthusiastically, “you’re sick.” One of my classmates committed (and was convicted of) teenage gun violence, so my community has had to deal with such tragedies first-hand.

Elephant is a self-righteous and distanced trek through an imaginary and optimistic stereotypical view of an unjustifiably large high school with far too few characters or scenes that bring any new knowledge or interest, especially now that school shootings are not the focus of our fear-based and fact-eluding media, as they were at the turn of the century when Elephant was released.