Come anticipate Elephant with me

That said, I am looking forward to it, especially as a representation of American youth. From the trailer, it looks like Van Sant has really tried to capture the look of a real high school and its students, in all their diversity and banality.

Everything I say is golden!

It didn't seem to get distribution while I was in the UK, but I note with interest that it will be available for rental in the next few weeks.

Seriously though. I'm not sure "Elephant" was strictly speaking necessary. It sure felt like just about anything you could say about Columbine (& other school shootings) on film was said with those few seconds of security camera footage that are right there in the middle of "Bowling for Columbine."

Whatever your opinion of the film, its politics and focus, etc...that piece of film is an absurdly horrifying and powerful artifact. I felt short of breath seeing it. I doubt Van Sant, however good his intentions or script, can even come close to that.

The trailer made it seem like they made the classic mistake, too- casting ridiculously good-looking kids as the "disaffected teenagers."

But whatever, maybe I just have high standards.

Also, Drugstore Cowboy was good despite Matt Dillon ditto My Own Private Idaho with Keanu and River P. Van Sant can be good about putting "beautiful" people in really sordid situations and making them both real and pathetic.

the criticial consensus--overwhelming positive, with a few dissenters like todd mccarthy (who i generally like)--at first struck me as extremely promising, now i'm not so sure.

anyway, i'll be seeing this tomorrow or saturday. i wonder if i'll need to avert my eyes. i'm not even sure why i'm going to see it... curiosity and peer pressure i suppose. the columbine massacre was so horrifying to me, and it always seemed one of those events best left alone, not revisited in any way but to memorialize the victims. i suppose that's a weak sort of response....

a lot of talk about the film's debt to "satantango," which van sant acknowledges and then some, although he also points out in cahiers that a similar structure has been present in much less forbidding films, like kubricks "the killing."

"satantango" is rather amazing, i would have called the ending unforgettable except i met a girl this week who forgot the ending.

Is it the fact that mainstream movies are so cut-happy that makes critics salivate all over no-cut masters like Bela Tarr? It's a bit Bazinian isn't it?

some thoughts:

--gus van sant has a good ear for teenagers. some of the time. his eye is less good. the "popular girls" tossing up together in the washroom was a sour note, as indeed was their entire dialogue. the terrifying nature of (american) adolescence--a notion which seems to have become critical cant, esp. in france--is seemingly all apportioned to the one killer and the girl who changes her clothes in terror in the locker room. the other characters seem rather too sure of themselves.

--the film was gorgeous, beautifully made on a shot by shot basis. the scene where elias takes a photo of the two punks and then walks away to school, and away from the stationary camera, was lovely, as were several other shots. van sant is smart with his long takes. though it owed even more to "satantango" than i had expected. the circular pan shot as the two killers are sleeping is a direct cop from a similar shot in "satantango."

--the part that was most interesting to me was the middle, where van sant attempts to make a kind of portrait of a suburban high school in synchronic time. the range of activities the students are taking part in...their postures and expressions...etc. a bit idealized, but also fairly true to my experience and occasionally, as with the conversation in the homo-hetero discussion group, really on the mark. i thought it was too bad this portrait had to be poisoned by the terrible foreboding that was the films eventual raison d'etre.

--all the aestheticism in the world, and this is a proudly aesthetic and aesthetically self-conscious film, and a successful on one those terms, doesn't really provide an answer to why the film was made for me. the point of the title is that there are too many answers and none at all. a fashionable conclusion. van sant's vaunted sympathy with and understanding of the teens seems to have a limit, notable in the aforementioned "popular girls" scene and most notably in the portraits of the killers themselves. their body language and interactions were much too composed, too...languid for belief. van sant seemed not just to rest content with an inconclusive conclusion but to edge their performances towards the opaque and calmly mysterious as well. cheating the mark.

--i'm not sure the film, w/r/t the massacre itself, really differed in its effect from a film that would have been made more conventionally. the long takes served a kind of suspense that's quite familiar, a kind of morbidity shot through with irony that can be found in countless action movies.

more thoughts later maybe.... my thoughts on the film are not much different from my apprehensions of it, as noted above.

it is interesting that not only did it win the palme d'or, but here in france it won an "educational" prize as well. and a cd-rom is being distributed by MK2 (the french distributor) with t he intention of being used by students.

the french seem to have a (i guess fairly understanable) fascination with american violence, notably teenage violence and dysfunctionality, which is the feature in last month's "cahiers." part of me worries that the hosannas being showered on this film owe something to a certain sense that the things that america (or part of it) prides itself on are fundamentally undercut my the violence and dysfunctionality.... they enjoy being confirmed (and by an american! tres authentique!) in their cynicism. fortunately the film doesn't completely pander to this... its portrait of the high school has considerable optimism in a way, and as an american i was even proud to recognize much of myself and my own background in it. before the bullets started flying of course.

because of my american-ness though i became something of an "expert" in answering after-screening questions about the columbine massacre and american high schools. which was weird.

the cinema is not real life. versimilitude is only that: an approximation. a shadow. stylization is one way "around" this concern but it is really not a way around it at all, just a different way of approaching it.

the massacre happened, it was awful, some victims are now disabled or spent years recovering...not to mention the friends and relatives of those killed. the film in reenacting much of the event (van sant says it isn't strictly columbine-aspired but that's b.s.) raises a moral question for me.... it inevitably (despite all attempts) somewhat reduces the event, cartoonizes it. that's what art does, i think, most of the time. which can be useful and didactic (not in the pejorative sense)...it can clear unnecessary things away. b ut in this case it seemed to take an event with a lot of real pain and then declare, "all glory to aesthetics!"

obv. i didn't HATE the film...i liked much in it...but would that van sant could have just made a portrait of an american high school w/o the massacre stuff.

speaking of bazin.... i seem to be something of a closet humanist....

Inevitably, what emerges is a profound sense of alienation and the oppressive, inescapable, and moribund institutionalization of its adrift and desperate characters.

WTF? this doesn't seem to have anything to do with the movie i just saw.

why do people need to cast high schools as these horrible places? my feelings about my own high school--and i was hardly popular by any means--are considerably more ambivalent, not to say rosier. why are people so oblivious to genuine happiness and happy aimlessness and pure hanging-out in the movies they see?

http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2003/10/24/elephant/

I know this is evil, but I've been waiting for Am. and Enrique to go head-to-head.

"We've watched one of the characters, an aspiring photographer, wandering the halls and grounds taking pictures of his classmates. Right after the first head goes splat, Van Sant cuts to this boy raising his camera and snapping a picture of the corpse."

The kid is clearly taking a photo of the killer, not the corpse, a discrete sign that he sees in Eric a portrait worth taking (perhaps he has not yet had time to process what has just happened or about to happen), signalling a recognition of humanity...my interpretation could be wrong, but in terms of convenient misremembering of the cutting in the film, Taylor is sadly far from the only critic guilty of this.

"It may look as if Van Sant is exercising discretion when two characters who have taken refuge in a meat locker back out of the frame and we see two hanging sides of beef while the kids are gunned down. But in Van Sant's scheme, the beef has as much distinction as the kids. This, I think, is what finally marks "Elephant" as a true exploitation movie. It's not that Van Sant is getting off on the killings or asking us to get off on them, but that he is simply using a real-life tragedy as fodder for his little art movie, and that he hasn't even done the thinking that would allow him to say there are no answers for these killings."

Though it is pretty obvious what is going to happen, the audience is not shown the kids gunned down. That Van Sant has not done the thinking necessary to say there are no answers for these killings is an interesting argument (although because the film was done sequentially and without a script you could also argue this is a moot point). However, he quickly disposes of many of the common "whys" our culture has ascribed to these school shootings from Springfield to Columbine. They kill because they are full of hate for a specific group of people: funny that they identify with the imagery of the nazi party, but are barely sure "which one is Hitler," or that the only tinge of remorse either killer emotes is when the blonde kid kills Benny, a black student. They kill because they listened to evil music: Van Sant retorts with the killers performing and enjoying Beethoven. Though there is some talk of 'picking off jocks,' the victims seem largely to be the victims of fate, social outcasts and popular kids alike which should cast doubt on those of us quick to name certain students "martyrs." Making this movie seems in many ways to be a no-win situation. If this is not a dramatization, with good 'performances' from the actors, than you are exploiting the event because it objectifies and fetishizes the kids. But had this been a dramatization, you would immediately be charged with sentimentality and exploitation. No portrayal can provide the answers so many of us (critics especially it appears) are looking for.

About the flatness of the characters: In the case of the killers as infuriating as it may be, by the time they are introduced it is clear they are committed to their plan. Why wouldn't they be calm, happy even if they had decided the course of action, the solution to all of their problems? As for the rest of the cast, it seemed pretty naturalistic to me...if Van Sant responded to this by creating an aesthetic which reflects and perpetuates this flatness is this necessarily a contrivance - "faux-naturalism?"

Perhaps the violence that is the elephant in the room is not some insidious abuse by one's peers, but the absence of adult responsibility for these children. From the drunk father, to the weed smoking or depressingly elderly workers in the cafeteria, to the teacher who tells his students that the gunfire is surely 'just a firecracker,' the adults serve only to perpetuate the valueless artifice that constitutes the adolescent world these kids are fated to inhabit.

Van Sant is an experimental film maker (even remaking Psycho was an experiment), he experiments, often failing to offer substantial conclusions. Despite all my protests above, I'm not sure that Elephant had any more point than Gerry, another movie that I liked though I'm not sure I would call it a "good movie" either.

Pardon me, my city appears to be on fire. More later perhaps.

I'm in England, haven't seen it, but have seen Alan Clarke's original, which I'm v. protective of, and from this side of the Atlantic I don't understand why Columbine is seen as almost equiv. to 9/11 in so many readings of the film. (Clarke's film is 'about' N Ireland.) I also don't really like the privileging of Tarr over Clarke in accounts of it -- to me there's a bunch of festival circuit snobbery wound around this (Clarke made TV movies; Tarr made strickly for critics 7 hour long films).

All film is style. Style is how meaning is produced. There is no meaning before style. The camera is never transparent.

yes, i was thinking this too this morning. as i saw it he was, almost instinctually, taking a photo of the killer.

don't have time at the moment to engage further...

Earth to whoever -- who the fuck transcribes cutting patterns? It'll actually mess up your viewing experience. Critics aren't scientists. Why is photographing somebody a 'recognition of their humanity'?

Remember, hataz, it says 'anticipate'!!

Van Sant is an experimental film maker

'Finding Forrester' = 'Wavelength' + 'Flaming Creatures'

*starts to sharpen knives*

In this case, the critic did, and improperly in order to further his point. It is one thing to interpret a scene, it is wholly another to invent one, as Taylor has done.

My suggestion that this photograph of Eric is a recognition of his humanity is that it puts him on the same level of worth (even if only as a portrait for a portfolio) as the young couple and the kid who had their photos taken earlier. Perhaps this was just an intuitive gesture, but it seemed striking to me.

"Remember, hataz, it says 'anticipate'!!"

Sorry.

"Need"? "Cast"?!? I guess I should've went to your HS ... was it private or public, I'm curious.

forgive me if i don't believe people when they say "yes."

a copy

nothing's unremitting, and saying it might've been better if it had been isn't actually completely ridiculous; but yeah, i'd say 45% bleak, 45% horrible, something like that. which i don't think is all that atypical an experience. given your gentle disbelief, i can only guess you've led a rarely charmed, happy life. or did as a teenager, anyhow.

i haven't bothered to read the (rather long) critical musings of others re: elephant, so if i am repeating you, my apologies. my own opinion: i enjoyed elephant to a certain degree. i thought the editing technique managed to stay topical and necessary in the context of the average american junior high / high school experience in which life (for most) first becomes complex through the division of the day's experience into segments or "periods" as they are commonly known. this, coupled with severe hormonal imbalance brings about a "every day is an eternity" feeling that i thought the film captured exactly.

what i disliked mainly was the actual school violence. i found it somewhat trite. i never felt like i was being offered anything to think about and just something to look at. the idea of the maladjusted, misunderstood youth was (for me) exhibited much more strongly in the beginning of the film. plus, if you know anything of the film (which presumably, everyone going to see it does) you are just waiting for the shooting to begin and it becomes a lame eventuality.

i will offer more points later once more people have seen it and won't be annoyed at me for discussing specific points.

also, i have a copy of satantango that i have been too much of a wimp to watch ... so daunting ... maybe now is the perfect time to do so.

(Totally serious, btw.)

but seriously, i saw copies on ebay for $80 (!!!) at one time. in fact there's an all region dvd on there now for a $70 buy-it-now. dubs no doubt, but still ... looks like there's some cheap dubs on there if you don't mind. i'm sure you can rent it in various large cities.

dean, these are my thoughts precisely, albeit in much better and clearer language than i used above.

i regretted that the interesting and sometimes charming portrait of a few teenagers and a kind of anthropological gaze at a high school had to be undercut by this terrible foreboding.

i'm told that for european audiences the film has a genuine anthropological interest. which gives me pause for reasons alluded to above.... on the one hand it had this kind of interest for me as well, but the idea that this film should represent the american high school for europeans... i'm both pleased with and a bit repulsed by this idea.

re: it being representative of american high schools ... well, i will only say that most schools should be lucky to be this nice. except for the killing of course, but i am speaking purely in objective terms re: the location and atmosphere and not the plot.

well, i will only say that most schools should be lucky to be this nice.

on a purely literal level, agreed. as far as the raft of ambiguous ironies/paradoxes/clues buried in the same statement, though ... well, isn't this a crucial component of the whole troubling scenario?

as for staggered lunches, sure, sure...but didn't it seem as though some of the people were just arriving to school? or was the point that john was only arriving at school around noon, hence the principal's evil eye?

And to say why $90 is a justifiable price for 'Satantango', as if it's the one film that you need to see, and that Tarr's eminence is unquestioned; in other words there are many classics you could get yer hands on for $90 that you haven't seen, I guarantee.

again, if the price seems exorbitant, i'd advise you contact rob tregenza and ask what are the circumstances that led to his charging that price under those conditions. certainly no one is making any kind of fortune off of the film, which doesn't necessarily mean that tregenza has chosen the ideal means--even for his own company--to distribute the film on video. but it's worth asking these questions without grumbling in a way that suggests you already know the answers.

anyway for those who can't get their hands on satantango i'd advise seeing werckmeister harmonies, which not only plays theaters more often (one of the mk2 cinemas in paris has been showing it weekly) but will soon be available, along with tarr's earlier damnation, on a dvd in the uk. the formal approach is similar, even if it lacks the overlapping structure that van sant borrows from elephant.

anyways, i'll be watching satantango tomorrow actually. maybe i'll post about it. maybe i'll make seven hours worth of posts about it.

i wouldn't burden "satantango" with being the anti-hollywood. i think it stands well enough on its own, in the eastern european tradition of miserablist state-sponsored (albeit in this case not state-sponsored) art cinema....

here's where i recommend the new dvd of miklos jancso's "silence and cry." jancso is *the* great hungarian director before tarr, and there are obvious similarities in the extensive use of very long takes and a fascination with violence. otherwise their films are very different.

http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/2003/1103/031107.html

I also thought that the sound design was excellent.

Just a couple things for now:

1. I do think it capture somes nice details about high school. I totally had flashbacks while watching this film: suddenly I remembered things like my locker combination (39-25-35) and what my gym clothes looked and felt like.

2. I know these are all unprofessional actors (exc. for Timothy Bottoms), but there were moments where the acting felt really stilted -- the most obvious, for me, being the girl who walks up to one of the killers in the cafeteria: "What are you writing?" "My plan." "For what?" "Oh, you'll see," and then, with absolutely no reaction, she crosses behind him, dialogue accomplished. One thing I'm actually really interested in about this film is the blend of naturalistic devices (like improvised dialogue, long takes, etc.) and stylistic devices (like the physical emptiness of the school, the fact that nobody screams during the killings). And so I'm guessing that the girl's non-responsiveness in this scene is intention, that it's meant to illustrate how nobody responds to the "warning signs," except it took me out of the film too much; all I could think about was Gus van Sant giving the girl directions.

the more i think about this film the more i realize how well achieved it is (again, it's also derivative, but i don't care about that so much) as a piece of storytelling. but i still think there is something rotten in the state of denmark, so to speak, in that this aesthetic achievement seems to have been won at the cost of exploiting a terrible event...

this aesthetic achievement seems to have been won at the cost of exploiting a terrible event...

Is he emphasizing style over content, or is this a case where style is content? If one subscribes to the Romantic assertion that "truth is beauty," then perhaps an aesthetic response to what many consider an unfathomable event is not entirely inappropriate. Like most of Van Sant's output, Elephant rides on intuition rather than intellect, the effect it has on the viewer largely oweing to its ability to trigger sensory memories of high school (evidenced up thread by the locker combination/gym clothes comment). Concerning exploitation, for me that hinges on whether this is a reductive or expansive take on what happened. I really can't decide. On the one hand it is such a laconic film, and seems stuck in time, offering no more than cursory glimpses into the lives of anyone involved, with little sense of buildup (though there is tension) or aftermath. The dreamy setting (itself nearly a character) reinforces this static quality, enshrouded as it is in the same sort of false tranquility that you might find in a tomb. However, Elephant's lack of analytic vigor could be seen as restraint, tactfully refusing to propagandize any explanation beyond what little we can know about "what happened," encouraging interpretation through such devices as the changing points of view (I remember thinking 'through who's eyes am I seeing now?' quite often which could lead to other thoughts about how perception dictates memory, understanding, and reality...leading to thoughts about how in such an environment/culture the difference between thought and action begin to break down - a much lower level of commitment to an idea being necessary to cross the boundary into that idea's implementation, etc.).

Probably Elephant is to Columbine (Springfield, etc) what Schindler's List is to the Holocaust. The analogy is not entirely fitting, but in some sense both movies market profound tragedy back to us rather than say anything intentionally or overtly meaningful about "why" such horror exists. I'm sure if someone was able to make a documentary like "Shoa," which really teases apart some of the complexities of the Final Solution and what it says about the culture that gave birth to it, something similar could be accomplished for a comparitively minor school shooting, though I'm not sure I would want to sit through that either.

i dont want to be reductive but this does seem to be the critical commonplace if not consensus. i really balk at it.

can anyone post a copy of todd mccarthy's review of elephannt from variety? i'm dying to read it.

see also "in cold blood" which i saw the other day and has about the same skill/bs ratio. it is also powerful but in the way someone slapping you in the face might be powerful.

The moral issues? I don't really see them. Only the very basic outline follows Columbine, all the characters are fictional, all the specifics are fictional. I have many more difficulties with the way CNN etc. handled Columbine. No one, after seeing this movie, is going to be inspired to do a school killing, which couldn't be said about the way Columbine was reported on TV.

There were things I didn't like in the movie - the kissing in the shower scene was gratuitous and didn't feel right, for example.

I was thinking just now about the Lindsay Anderson movie "If" and how so radically differently that plays the school killing scenario, despite some strange similarities.

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/439410/index.html

Synopsis of the 'original' 1989 film 'Elephant by Alan Clarke.

A man walks into a public swimming pool and searches the corridors. He finds the janitor cleaning the changing rooms and shoots him with a shotgun. A car pulls into a petrol station at night; a man gets out of the car, walks up to the counter, pulls out a pistol and shoots the cashier. Upon entering a disused factory, a man is ambushed and shot repeatedly in the back. At another factory, a man searches the corridors. Upon finding another man in the toilet, he shoots him with a shotgun.

Daytime in a quiet park. After initially walking past two men, a third man turns around and shoots them both in the back with a pistol. Two men walk into a café at night-time. One of the men approaches a diner and shoots him in the head. At an empty warehouse, a man pulls out a shotgun and shoots another man twice in the back. A quiet street in the evening. A man knocks on a front door. The door is opened and the first man shoots the second six times in the back.

Daytime, three youths play football in a park. A man approaches them and asks one of them where he was last night. Before the youth has finished his reply, the man shoots him. A petrol station at night. A man is returning to his car after paying for his fuel only to be shot by a man waiting outside. A man walks into a flat above a butcher's shop and shoots the two occupants with a pistol. A man opens his door only to be shot by another man with a pistol.

A factory at night. A man walks in and shoots another six times with a pistol. A man follows another man through a car park. When the first man reaches his car, he is shot twice with a pistol. An industrial estate during the day. Two armed men chase a third man. One of the armed men shoots the third man with a shotgun - he falls but is still alive. The other man walks up to the fallen man and shoots him in the head with a pistol. A man answers his front door to another man who bursts in and kills him and another occupant.

Two men approach a house. One goes to the front door, the other waits at the back. The house's two occupants flee out of the back only to be shot by the waiting man. Two men walk through a deserted factory at night eventually reaching an empty room where third man waits for them. One of the two men stands the other against a wall and the third man shoots him in the back.

Yes, Saturday night at the movies/Who cares what picture you see?

Not Alan. Actually, it was prime-time BBC2 stuff, and it's very very intense, nothing like anything. From the director of 'Scum' and 'Rita, Sue, and Bob Too'.

COME EMANCIPATE ELEPHANTS WITH ME!

Don't worry, Eric, I'll be seeing Gerry soon.

just saw elephant and thought it fantastic.

I think they both have their merits. While they are very very similar, I think I'd give the edge to Elephant just because the first half is so stellar and interesting.

this is a weird one huh.

i don't really understand why they did what they did. bt it kinda felt that van sant was working at such an unrefined level of abstraction or such a small scale that we wr only meant to catch a glimpse of everything. perhaps why thr was so many 'moving' / mobile / chasing shots - there's not much interaction in fact very little interaction in all the shots where the camera follows.

haha synchronised bulimia?! um a bit silly.

it's beyond easy i think to point holes in the computer game representation (um wtf) but also, WHY?

the hitler stuff foregrounded wtf.

i really like the accentuated feeling of the acoustics of certain shots: gym-trousers girl mopes across an empty gym; eric deafened by the cacophony of the dinner hall.

two favourite shots: eli's death played to the sound of a camera click rather than the gun turning out another bullet; & the inanity of the girls' chat in the dinner hall ('whay, you want 95% of my time?!') just before the action starts causing pretty depressing relief (depressing on behalf of the shooters not on the side of the talkers no).

it ws ok, not too special i didn't think. could've done without all the shooting, perhaps.

this is probably personal bete-noir: but what i liked a lot about it is what i like a lot about this period of my life: the friendships are so strong for there under-analysis and under-talking. the friendships made in school always have this idealised state of being pure contingency: this may just be a 'i went to a small school' thing: but to a large extent one has little choice in our friends at school. (ok we have a *choice* but the pool to choose from is so scant: i'm not explaining too well why i like this.)

the school is so big. you couldn't have done this in my school.

the clothes are pretty weird too. speaking from a scottish bed arrived at through scottish schools: mostly we wear uniforms throughout both levels of school: the point being that clothes can be a focal point for the articulation of substantive difference: and exacerbatory: this probably played a part in the discrimination of the columbine shootings but wasn't allowed to in this film. i.e. i thought the library girl ws going to get off w. her life :(

i didn't understand why the 'gay' shower scene.

the film is pretty gorgeous and has is quite weird elegiac, it kinda has the aesthetics of the dry dreamyness of jim o'rourke's production sound.

why is moonlight sonata so good huh?

"you couldn't have done this in my school" = this kinda massacra couldn't have taken place, it would empty too quickly.

"the clothes are pretty weird" = i'm not used to seeing school kids dressed in normal 'weekend' / after-school clothes.

delete: the superfluous 'has'.

elephant is STILL playing here

moonlight sonata and fur elise are beyond beautiful, but for that same reason i worry abt their use in the film, see also tarkovsky's solaris with its liberal use of a bach cantata

The game was bothersome and facile but had the advantage of being sort of perfect for the kids' blankness: people stand on a blank white plane and you shoot them. Nothing attacks you; there's no point; you just shoot them. Nevertheless: please.

One of many interesting post-movie details discovered by me and fellow viewer: at many points we were dwelling on the same minor details in frame, for instance one particular chair in one particular classroom. I want to expand but I have to call my mother.

that last point is really interesting nitsuh, i'll look out for that today, in post-screening chat.

you fancy any of those other films?

sorry elephant ppl

other things i liked abt elephant:

i. the echo of the 'how do you tell if a person is gay? pink hair' conversation in a random girl (in mid-focus in the cafeteria) with pink hair - i guess this wd be similar to an internal rhyme in a poem, just picking out soft reliefs of content

ii. what it felt like first time around was that van sant had set out to film a movie where he'd construct several characters fr sympathising with and then relay their stories in synchronic time and have them shot at the end -> causing much upset -> if this is wht he did try do (which i don't think so much now) then it felt like he'd failed, and left a distaste in my mouth. it felt like an 80 minute long short. however, second time around it felt like van sant only really wanted to present these 'characters' as workable humans so that we cd understand possible hurt we feel when they die. the stories aren't particularly interesting, i mean they're not even really stories (cf. ex-navy uncle visits your house as a child: 'oh i could tell you some stories'; grandpa sits by bed of sleepy child: 'tell me a story gramps!') as commonly understood. as i said above there's too much movement, too much following to really let them sit down and develop.

iii. haha american schools: girls dancing in the corridor wtf! you see a couple of girls in the background as eli walks to the dark room.

iv. what annoyed me the first time round was how it seemed like van sant was trying to crush all the external cultural factors which could go into pushing ppl into doing such a dreadful thing all into one / two scenes: eric plays piano [pan] alex sits and plays his computer game [pan] more piano, then stop [pan] eric sits down to the computer (and look look he relaxes after the stress of fur elise where he seems tense!) as alex reads a book. then the hitler documentary (the ghost of a giggling beavis and butthead haunts this scene).

- it felt like quite a compelling little stab at the reductivism of blaming these massacres as the felt materialisation of all these 'evil' cultural vectors.

v. note: interesting thing this time round, alex shoots the first two ppl in the back and then lines up to shoot the third in the front but chooses not to and re-aligns himself so he shoot the third in the back!! then shoots the rest in the back!!

vi. my favourite scene still the girls in the cafeteria but what i noticed extra this time round: after the girls have stopped talking about john they go on to talk about their friendship but one of the girls looks up and notices something out of the window just holds her gaze for a short few seconds, an interested glance, then sets back to her food. this is kinda chilling in a 'you've just presaged yr own doom but not realised it' way. really really effective.

vii. the alan clarke film wow!

It pisses me off that Van Sant can't resist bringing his own agenda to the fim - the discusion in the ethics class about whether you could recognise a gay person in the street and to a lesser extent the homosexual shower scene (though i thought this worked fairly well it would have been a better fim without it). I just couldnt work out what it was in there for.

The actors are too beautiful, why couldnt he just have employed normal looking guys rather than model types? ( i mean raf simons or hedi slimane type models rather than beefcake ones). Are we supposed to care more cos the guys are HOTT? The male characters all seem to have their own identity and seem fairly diverse whereas the girls are all basically dumb "valley girl" types... apart from the token "ugly" girl of course.

The scene where the "ugly' girl gets changed after gym is the best scene of the film.

As noted above the Popular girls lunch/ bulimia scene is a serious false note in the film - much as i reckon this could actually happen they played it out like characatures and the dialogue is terrible. Its not realistic enough either - can you throw up 2 bites of lettuce?

The worst part of the fim: We get intoduced to a black character "benny" in the last few minutes of the film who silently floats through the shooting scenes like some wise old seer. Is that because Black people are really spiritual? and that handsome black men who dont speak are most spiritual of all?

As i said though i thought it was well made but that made the problem scenes all the more...em, problematic.

ix. i liked it a lot more this time. there's loadsa time to think about this movie when yr watching it eh?

sorry to go on.

hi colin!

another bad thing: Clouds of foreboding.

Hello David!

there's this horrible sense - which i identified creeping into me too (and is borne of playing too many computer death match games) - near the end where eric is looking through the school for more victims to shoot and there's no more, it looks like he's really quite frustrated about this ('can't clear this level until i kill the last guy, goddamn where is he?') - i've experienced this a lot playing comp. games which only 'clear' once all baddies are shot dead. :( i'm only being honest.

but breaking into computer games analogies perhaps only plays into the hands of those i mentioned as caricatured / lambasted in point iv. above.

i liked the yellow t shirth with the bull on it.

also re: at many points we were dwelling on the same minor details in frame, for instance one particular chair in one particular classroom - can you give any more particular examples of this nitsuh?

this is a beautiful way to put it i think, but i still think van sant is hedging here. these scenes exist to do at least two things at once--(1) to raise and then tacitly dismiss the spectre of these pop-cultural scapegoats. but (2) they could just as easily present themselves in a more opaque fashion, as simple allusions to the manifold explanations that people tossed out in the aftermath of columbine. but why is it presumed to be impossible or unwise for van sant to take a position as to what confluence of forces might help explain the tragedy? is this sort of thing universally understood to be beyond our ken? i suppose i have more faith in the sort of social-work type stuff than van sant does--i mean there will always remain a strong if not decisive element of mystery w/r/t columbine, but what are the reasons for making a film that amplifies that mystery, that aestheticizes it?

i'm not sure i'm even "opposed" to this, to van sant's MO, but i am pertrubed by the critical cant that this is the only honest or serious way of "dealing" with the massacre. i can well imagine a sort of afterschool type special thing, with its litany of "problems" and even more typaged characters, being perhaps as or even much more enlightening and sincere and useful as van sant's film.

Indeed, the school “community” is quick to ostracise any one of its members who dares to show the slightest independence of thought or manifestation of individuality. There’s the gawky, awkward Michelle, told off by her teacher for not wearing shorts like everyone else, talked about in the shower room behind her back (the word “loser” shoots out from the conversation like a bullet), dressed in as much red as she can tolerate.

this is where i think people are projecting their own adolescence (or some romantic version of it) on the film, and missing it's essential ambivalence. michelle is not "told off" by her teacher for not wearing shorts; the teacher is actually quite considerate seeing as it's her job to enforce the rule. and michelle not wearing shorts isn't some proud statement of independence but a manifestation of her discomfort with her body. i went through this too; i hated wearing shorts in gym. in any event, the film doesn't take pains to paint high school as this neverending trauma for the virtuous. eli, the "artsy" kid, seems to be untraumatized enough (btw are we sure he gets killed in the end? i don't recall a shot--no pun intended--clearly illustrating this). the football player guy is quite sympathetic and clearly intended to be quite popular as well. as for michelle, her ostracization, while real enough, doesn't seem to stem from any "independence of thought"--she's just physically unconfident and socially awkward. a much less romantic form of pariahdom, and one that renders michelle a little less an easy figure of audience sympathy than if she were some kind of emotional savant.

???

hoberman said his role was a cryptic allusion to george bush, given their physical resemblance and the characters (1) alcoholism, (2) seeming general incompetence, (3) false nostalgia for combat

Similarly, when we see the extended Nazi documentary excerpt, with its emphasis on burning books (“Hitler hated intellect and intellectuals”), we are made aware that they can never grasp the idea of art as salvation, or the idea of other opinions being as or more valid than their own. So we can guess that their first and bloodiest port of call will be the school library.

i would never have thought to read these things symbolically. the most *proximate* reason the killers (in real life and in the film) concentrated on the library is because of its location in the school and because there were likely to be numerous people there, no?

What about this black character, Benny, at the end though? i found that badly misjudged.

though there is a third, unseen gunman in the film’s last five minutes

do you mean when the one shooter dies? i read that his friend had shot him, then followed the sounds of the "jock" and his girlfriend into the kitchen. granted the shot is cleverly framed so as to be...i wouldn't say ambiguous, but elusive.

i have no idea what the benny thing was about

what do you think cozen?

Surely you're aware of the nagging idea that if it's hard to be both cultured and evil?

Who is the third gunman that Marcello refers to?

What the hell was Benny doing?

sorry

as i said what i like about my idealised memories of the friendships i held in that time of my life was the now-perceived remoteness of our connections. that we could think of ourselves as friends! so when marcello says the kids don't really connect it makes me thk van sant's eye fr these interactions is bit more tuned & understanding.

hehe i kinda like his line on the three girls 'pretending to be friends'.

i don't agree that there's only one shocking moment of manifest violence, but as in alan clarke the drama of all the situations varies as written. although it's not strictly fair to compare the two films on this point as clarke's is fundamentally different: being a study in formality.

other things.

benny was a hero in that he helped a bunch of people escape

i agree with marcello about the most shocking moment

sorry

Yeah, that's kind of the way I read it (didn't think anything of his colour). It was just the blank look on his face that threw me a bit. But then lots of the kids seemed to look like that.

as i said above, my love of the alex/eric scene is that it doesn't strictly explain anything; plus what that 'means'.

oh i totally agree w. marcello re: the shocking moment, but to maintain that it is the only incident of manifest violence in the film is to try and cast it in such relief as to elevate it unjustly.

"... his speech came from a world just beyond his body."

AMA- That was def. my reaction as soon as I saw it. I'm not saying that Van Sant is int. creating that image but he def. has to be aware that in this very white school, the black student is going to stand out, esp. as a savior. Not to mention the fact that Benny walks in a very affected manner which may be due to many things, but since it is in the final version of the film, it's hard to not read it as the director's intent.

i liked how michelle really didn't seem especially likeable or charismatic, as i hinted at before--he doesn't romaniticize her pariahdom. she didn't have the advantage of being "apart" like eli who could wander around taking pictures. she had to work--there's a kind of intuitive linking of social and economic marginalization which seems sort of acute to me, given the upper middle class suburban context

benny had a walk that's very familiar to me--i went to a suburban high school that was 45 per cent black

My girlfriend came out of it and asked "Is it bad that I fancied all the boys in it?" (I think she was referring to John, Alex, Nathan and Eli.

Whoever it was who praised the long sportsfield -> Nathan walking round the school shot with the entire Moonlight Sonata movement OTM, also btw.

my point about michelle working at the library was not just to refute you. i don't think it was volunteer work but i might be wrong. at my high school you could get paid to work a few hours a week in the library.

That's not at all what I meant. I think there's something very distinct in the way he moves. He is very unfazed by the situation, but does not come across as a stereotypically tough guy. Perhaps it is the filtering of 'toughness' through a homosexual lens? It's certainly a more respectable position, if I am in fact correct, but it continues to stand out greatly to me, each of the times I've seen it.

yeah his walk i think betrayed a great physical confidence but only a faint, almost sublimated machismo

Me too, kind of. I need to start hearing it a few times in nice situations again so that it isn't forever associated in my mind with mass murder and implied rape.

Phew - they're all friends really!

the whole languid way the killers moved around, their blase-ness about it all, struct me as the stupidest aspect of the film by far

'most plausible'? I wasn't even aware on watching it that there was supposed to be any ambiguity about this? How odd. So that's what Marcello meant.

But, hey -- where were the parents at?

Gus van Sant: "You just watch and make the associations for yourself, as opposed to having film-makers impose ideas on you. Here the causes have already happened and I don't think there's a clear answer as to why. So we're not showing the causes, just the criss-crossing network of the last two days." (italics added)

http://www.pbs.org/americanhigh/characters/images/character_morgan.jpg

Also, I was briefly obsessed with that hippie folksinger girl (as in I actually went to a bar to see her play) (and then wrote a monologue about that, which I performed in public) (I know, I know).

i'm getting tired of this line, it's become critical commonplace; the new "this movie lets you know you're watching a movie"

ALL films are at least half in your head, otherwise they wouldn't work

this statement has some truth behind it in certain contexts but often it's just wishful thinking

We are not at school. I don't have to explain myself to you or anyone else. I was going to contribute to this thread but your arsy comment has put me off doing so. Therefore, work it out for yourself, just like Gus van Sant wants you to do.

Yes. And for me, it confirmed all my worst fears about the North Shore, hahaha.

i don't really have any ingrained anti-suburban prejudice or even ambivalence really. i like the suburbs. i think that partly explains my liking the show.

i just think you "read" the shot wrong marcello, but it's possible that's an ambiguity van sant deliberately courted

Alex shoots eric btw, although i thought he did it as there was no one left to shoot (until he became aware of the couple) - also why didnt they go through a door as opposed in to a fridge - the canteen had exits!

But overall it lacked the power of the cctv footage from Bowling..... now thatwas powerful.

What really bugged me was why no one in a sleepy american suberb heard an M16 fire repeatedly in the middle of the day - surely there would have been mothers around

I loved how positive the killers were. The little pep speech about "staying focused" was amazing.

my overall negative reaction stayed with me while the many little things i liked about it i had forgotten until i reread this thread.

I loved the time-lapsing in 'last days' a lot - it didn't have the artificial feel of something like memento or even elephant, by which I mean I didn't feel like I was being made to learn the language of the film before I could start to understand it - when I came out of the cinema I still didn't really understand how it the film had moved backwards and forwards... which is perhaps van sant refining the technical expertise he gained from working through elephant the way he did to th epoint where the practical had become the poetic and so almost part of his sensibility... like some natural chronographic sense

I don't know - I didn't like 'last days' when I came out of the cinema and I'm still not sure I like it now - it's a confused mess in places, punctuated with interminable walking but it's really stayed with me, which is a first in a while

no, it's just a whole 'thing' -- warhol-blankness-sonic youth-new york-indie -- that i don't like much. the whole anti-narrative thing, have we not done this?

I don't think "narrative" implies "moral" in any way and I think most critical theory on this subject would tend to back me up on that point.

this isn't true btw

do you still like this?
my overall negative reaction stayed with me while the many little things i liked about it i had forgotten until i reread this thread.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Friday, March 25, 2005 7:24 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark

still meaning to write more about this grotesque film

six years on. ouch.

The best thing I can say about this thing is I've forgotten it.

Want to sketch out a throughline from this movie to This Is It.

i really, really hate this movie. in fact, it sticks out in my mind as one of the only, if not _the_ only, movie that i have been forced to sit through that i utterly hate. it's vile.

probably GVS's best. glad it won the Palme.

peace.

word out.