Gus Van Sant's Elephant: How To - Page 2

In Elephant the tracking shots attempt paradoxically to purify the action of the moviemakers' intentions. The shots go on so long they almost function as jokes because you become aware of yourself as a movie-"magic" junkie waiting in vain for the non-actors to hit their marks, for the point of the technique to be revealed. (There's a shot of a kid crossing an empty gym that reminded me of the scene of Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy (1960) filling a vast auditorium with folding chairs, one at a time.) In Elephant Van Sant is after the opposite effect from GoodFellas. He's not trying to compact a specific viewpoint into the imagery but rather to replicate the random trajectories of a handful of students through an average day. The fact that it turns out not to be average isn't even shaped for irony.

Van Sant thus has two contradictory things to convey at once: on the one hand the sense that the crime was somehow produced and on the other the everyday life that it disrupted seemingly out of the blue. (The more usual thing he gets down is how to show various simultaneous strands of action without intercutting them.) His aesthetic hunch pays off, but it is perhaps not a long enough, or full enough, movie to make this intriguingly unstressed technique pay off in terms of the subject matter.

Possibly the only way to do justice to the subject matter, the why of the crime, would be to employ the technique on a much broader scale. In A Cry in the Dark (1988), a movie about the sensational Australian case of a woman convicted of murdering her baby, which had in fact been killed by a dingo, Fred Schepisi intercuts the woman's travails with the public reaction to the story as they follow it through the news media, and you get an almost sociological sense of how justice gets distorted in her case.

In Elephant Van Sant closes out the world beyond the kids he follows. We don't see much of parents, teachers, administrators, or all that much of student interactions or the culture they enjoy. We glimpse everything and though there are no barriers to our access neither is there the kind of authorial shaping that might produce insight. It appears Van Sant would consider that objectionably intrusive, with the result that he's so engaged in how to film the subject that the subject is barely broached.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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