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Van Sant’s “Elephant” is a violent film within the sense that many harmless persons are shot lifeless. But it surely is not violent in the way in which it presents these deaths. There is no such thing as a pumped-up fashion, no lingering, no launch, no climax. Simply implacable, poker-faced, flat, uninflected demise. Truffaut mentioned it was onerous to make an anti-war movie as a result of struggle was thrilling even for those who have been towards it. Van Sant has made an anti-violence movie by draining violence of vitality, function, glamor, reward and social context. It simply occurs. I doubt that “Elephant” will ever encourage anybody to repeat what they see on the display. Rather more than the insipid message motion pictures proven in social research courses, it would encourage helpful dialogue and soul-searching amongst highschool college students.
Van Sant merely follows various college students and academics as they arrive on the faculty and go about their each day routines. A few of them intersect with the killers, and plenty of of these die. Others escape for no specific purpose. The film is informed largely in lengthy monitoring photographs; by avoiding cuts between closeups and medium photographs, Van Sant additionally avoids the movie grammar that goes together with such cuts, and so his visible technique would not load the cube or attempt to inform us something. It merely watches.
At one level he follows a tall, assured African-American pupil in a really lengthy monitoring shot as he walks into the varsity and down the corridors, and all of our expertise as filmgoers leads us to imagine this motion may have definitive penalties; the child embodies all these film heroes who stroll into hostage conditions and discuss the dangerous man out of his gun. But it surely would not occur like that, and Van Sant sidesteps all the standard modes of film conduct and easily reveals us unhappy, sudden demise with out function.
*****
“I need the viewers to make its personal observations and draw its personal conclusions,” Van Sant informed me at Cannes. “Who is aware of why these boys acted as they did?” He’s sincere sufficient to confess that he doesn’t. After all a film a few tragedy that doesn’t clarify the tragedy — that gives no private of social “causes” and provides no “options” — is sort of towards the regulation within the American leisure business. In the case of tragedy, Hollywood is within the catharsis enterprise.
Van Sant would have discovered it troublesome to search out financing for any model of this story (Columbine is not “industrial”), however to inform it on a small funds, with out stars or a formulation screenplay, is unthinkable. He discovered the liberty to make the movie, he mentioned, due to the success of his “Good Will Looking,” which gave him monetary independence: “I got here to comprehend since I had no must make some huge cash, I ought to make movies I discover attention-grabbing, no matter their end result and viewers.”
