Film
Daylight sonata
by Philip Matthews
ELEPHANT: Directed by Gus Van Sant
Gus Van Sant’s film Elephant is named after a 1989 film by the legendary, deeply political British film-maker Alan Clarke, whose title suggested that Northern Ireland – his subject – was the proverbial elephant in the room that no one talks about. There is another reference, too: the concept, beloved of philosophers, that people experiencing separate parts of the same elephant will conclude that they are different creatures – it’s all ears, it’s all trunk, it’s all tail. Van Sant’s Northern Ireland, explained and experienced differently by all, is the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado.
Clarke’s film had a kind of horrifying purity. Stripped of characterisation and even dialogue, it presented anonymous killers moving towards anonymous targets. Each of the 18 killings was shot documentary-like, with the steadicam lingering on the bodies for longer than is comfortable. Van Sant’s film doesn’t have that eviscerating rawness, but its obliqueness and sense of detachment might frustrate those looking for tidy dramas and reassuring conclusions, or even Michael Moore-style blame-making. It’s less Bowling for Columbine than Daydreaming for Columbine.
As art, it’s beautiful and impressive. Lately, long after the lovely, downbeat poetry of his early peaks Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant has followed commercial binges with art purges. The mainstream crowdpleaser Good Will Hunting was followed by a perverse experiment – a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho. As 2000’s Finding Forrester ran like a tired clone of Good Will, the reaction has been so extreme as to suggest a form of penance: first, Gerry, a two-hander shot in alienating long takes, unreleased here; then Elephant, which is a calm and abstract response to hysteria.
So, how do you present the unimaginably horrible? Given its status as a media event, it might be that the best filmic representation of the Columbine killings will always be a short clip that actually predated the massacre: that segment late in The Matrix when two of the movie’s trenchcoat mafia bust into a high-rise packed with security guards, guns blazing. Killing and being killed hadn’t had such romantic, drop-dead glamour since the last act of Bonnie and Clyde – that Matrix clip might have been the looped reel playing through the heads of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the Columbine killers.
But killing has no glamour here. Taking his cue from Clarke, Van Sant doesn’t just upset expectations, he rethinks film’s basic language. His long, long takes follow his students – mostly non-actors – down the long, long corridors of the decommissioned Portland, Oregon, high school that was his primary location. Nothing dramatic happens. Then he follows another student. Conversations, when they occur, are banal – the stuff of real high schools. He drops reaction shots entirely for cinematographer Harris Savides’s long, steady gaze and slow, careful glide. We’re so familiar with the rapid edits and he said/she said reaction shots of American commercial cinema – we’re so used to confusing that set of conventions with “reality” – that this style is as jarring as a fractured Picasso was to those used to lifelike portraits. Suddenly, you notice the camera. You notice the simulation. You notice the movie.
Of course there are precedents besides Clarke. Van Sant cites the Hungarian director Bela Tarr – particularly, Tarr’s seven-hour-long Satantango – as inspirational. Similar time and motion experiments drove Bruno Dumont’s brilliant L’Humanite, in which a murder mystery gave way to a sad, awkward form of transcendence – like Elephant, that film also had its Cannes win greeted with hoots and dismay. In search of the transcendent, Van Sant opens Elephant with the sky shots that will punctuate throughout: it suggests the whole, ghostly story taking place in one moment, forever lost.
The killers are not introduced until about halfway in. Different kids appear, walking those same corridors on eternal pilgrimages to nowhere. We see John, Nathan, Elias – as in Idaho, there is some fetishising of good-looking young men in these long observations. There are girls, too – including the three who throw up their lunches, the nervous, bullied girl who skips gym class to go to the library – but there are moments that a straight director might not have included: the roving camera dips into a room where a gay and lesbian student group discusses, aptly, whether one can tell if someone is gay just by looking at them.
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