Sublime Anarchism

Elephant is based on an ordinary high school in USA. The film is shot in a school in Portland, Oregon (Oregon high school) but this can be any other school in any other day. The story follows few school students (they are all amateur actors, took their actual names in the movie and choose their own wardrobe with improvised dialogues; in gist Gus Van Sant provided total independency for the casts) talking mundane stuff, a student with a drunk father, socially cool and punk couple, girls are eying “cute” football player, a photographer, a girl ashamed of changing shorts in locker-room, students discussing about visual discrepancies between straight/gay couple, a physics class etc. All these incidents are very regular and routine wise prior to an anarchism which is going to take place.

Elephant is motivated by the firing spree incident took place in Columbine high school, Colorado in 1999. The killing massacre by two school students shocked the country at large and instigated the media with a massive play (for example, Michael Moore with his Bowling for Columbine documentary). The media had their own explanations of the gory occurrence (disintegration of family values? militarism? lack of gun control?) but Van Sant did not try to provoke any of the reasons. Rather, he did not give any clarification of the fictitious anarchism fabricated in the movie. Instead he refused to tender easier clarifications for what he believes are horrifying events that are better left without solutions. Sant deliberately handled the open ended story which emerges as a profound sense of estrangement and unavoidable behavior of its loose and desperate characters.

I was wondering about the title of the movie. After little googling I found out “…In other words the problems of high school students should be as hard to ignore as an elephant in a bedroom, but they're also as easy to mistake as an elephant being examined by blind men. Therefore Van Sant believes that we never really know what we are touching in our lives, and such random acts of violence that continue to plague us in our culturally ruptured society cannot be answered simplistically as most critics readily do in order to fit their own preconceived agendas…”

I was particularly captivated by the "sublime" detachment of Elephant. In the opening scene we observe a blue sky changing the shades; we observe cheerful fall colors. The last night, before the shooting fling we notice the same sky, now getting darker with cloud. This aloofness is again demonstrated by the killers. Just after playing Beethoven’s “Für Elise” they seem to be obsessed with Nazi propaganda in TV and in buying guns from the internet. The guns are actually not for practice, yet to shoot their fellow friends and faculties (they have meticulously planned the attacking). Van Sant crafted a nice minimal method to tackle these.

The cinematography is structured in loops. The camera follows the characters around the school (ah! the long corridors) in an elegant fluid path. We see many a crossroads of the characters in the trajectories of the tracking camera, the story changes its navigation from face to face and often comes back to the same character in a time slice, the camera changes it's focal point between faces, often we a similar scene (how can I forget those sudden jerks of slow motioned shots!) being shot from different angles and different person’s perspective. We observe the characters are intrinsically linked together through the long labyrinthine corridors and rooms. Unfolding of the story is really brilliant with this kind of cumulative and powerful impacts.

Elephant is a deeply disturbing, strange and uncomfortable portrait of the recitation of a modern day blood massacre. The treatment is softer which makes the whole thing (the Elephant?) more shocking.

Thus a killer aptly utters before the massacre - the most important thing is to have fun!

Strictly recommended.

Elephant (2003)
Directed By : Gus Van Sant