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.

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.