Elephant (2003)
- Researching the context, addressed issues, and Filmmaking
Gus Van
Sant
What other films has the director made?
Good Will
Hunting (1997), Milk (2008), My Own Private Idaho (1991)
How may the director be considered an auteur?
An artistic/poetic
indie filmmaker with Hollywood success, focusing on marginalised and/or isolated
characters – the success made it mainstream and accessible to viewers. Both a
painter, photographer, and filmmaker - therefore a visual artist. Challenge(ed) conventions and
controversies with his characters and subject, yet a sense of realism as he
allows his actors to improvise.
What awards did it receive?
Palme d’Or
at the Cannes Film Festival and Best Director Award; New York Film Critics
circle for Best Cinematography; French Syndicate of Cinema Critics for Best
Foreign Film; Nominated: Best American Film at Bodil Awards; César Awards for
Best Foreign Film; Independent Spirit Awards for Best Director and Best
Cinematography.
What issues does the film address?
Inspired by
the 1999 Columbines school shooting (Colorado) where two students killed 13 people and later committed suicide – preceded by Michael Moore’s 202 documentary
‘Bowling for Columbine; the incident was still on people’s minds.
What sort of ideology do you think the director will be
presenting?
Focusing on
the school shooters, I think the director will explore their motivations/ideology,
social problems in an American school environment and/or State it is set in.
Controversial topics and subversive content/taboo of time period.
Find 3 Reviews for the film
‘It offers
no explanation for the tragedy, no insights into the psyches of the killers, no
theories about teenagers or society or guns or psychopathic behavior. It simply
looks at the day as it unfolds, and that is a brave and radical act; it refuses
to supply reasons and assign cures, so that we can close the case and move on.’
Roger Ebert, 2003
‘pointless
at best and irresponsible at worst… No matter how easy and natural the kids seem on camera, Van Sant’s
approach is ultimately superficial…Climactic violence is handled in abrupt
spasms of shooting separated by long eerie silences… Van Sant doesn’t prolong
or dwell on the deaths removes the voyeuristic element of standard crime films,
but their quick disposal also depersonalizes them nearly to the extent of
relegating them to the status of statistics.’ Tom McCarthy, 2003
‘“Elephant”
forced us to see the normal inside the horrific…The movie captures the
uneventfulness of it all from the outside but still, in bursts, pierces through
the personal problems of each individual character mired in their own
confusing, conflicted adolescence.’ Soham Gadre, 2020
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/elephant-99722/ :
‘What Van
Sant sees with piercing clarity are the bruises that come with being young in
America. His movie, set on a fall day at an unnamed high school in Portland,
Oregon, uses real high school students who improvise their dialogue… the camera
pokes around, catching snippets of talk, observing the beauty of one young face
and the desolation of another… It’s only
in the film’s final chapter that Van Sant takes us home with the shooters. All
the glib excuses for violence are laid out here, including the ease with which
the boys obtain guns on the Internet… the film’s detractors to label the pair
“Nazi homos.” Did they hear Alex’s line (“I never even kissed anybody before”)?
Did they wonder why parents, teachers and peers never noticed what made these
two boys outsiders in the first place? Did they wonder when it became so easy
not to pay attention?...This isn’t a film about what turns kids into killing
machines. It is a film that gets at the small things that can drain a heart of
feeling’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/17/columbine-massacre-gun-crime-us :
‘two more
unhinged American teenage misfits had snapped after years of bullying at the
hands of the "jocks", the sporting overlords of their universe, and
gone on a murderous rampage with semi-automatic weapons through their suburban
high school. Or that's the version we were told, anyway…In contrast to previous
American school shootings, which had unfolded in hard-to-reach locales…this one
happened half an hour's drive from a major media hub…The cameras captured it
all…Another victim, already badly wounded in the head, arm and legs but seized
by a compulsion to get out of the school at any cost, somehow pirouetted his
broken body across a window ledge and let himself tumble into the arms of two
waiting officers. That, too, was broadcast live on international television…Swat
teams pumping bullets into locked classroom doors…Harris and Klebold were
already lying dead in the library, along with 10 of their 13 murder victims…this
was a school with 2,000 students - and were, to a large extent, repeating
things they were themselves picking up from the television coverage…All those
stories were the product of hysteria, ignorance and flailing guesswork…Their
ambition, harboured for about a year and a half and chronicled meticulously on
Harris's website and in the boys' private journals, recovered after their
deaths, was to blow up the entire school…Harris quietly despised the people he
took so much trouble to charm and could not wait to see them all die horrible
deaths…Klebold, by contrast, was a depressive, perpetually racked by the idea
that he was a failure, despite having a loving family and privileged background…The
boys had decided on 19 April - the anniversary of the botched government siege
at Waco, Texas, in which 76 people perished by fire in 1993, and also the
anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing…Everything about the Columbine
disaster is tinged with failure…The school, meanwhile, failed to recognise the
danger, even though Harris spilled much of his venom on his publicly accessible
website, and even though Klebold wrote an essay two months before the attack
about a man gunning down innocents and enjoying it… The sheriff's department
was dysfunctional from start to finish, preferring to cover up what it had
known about the killers and doing nothing to contradict the
nerds-targeting-jocks story… Harris and Klebold were playing to the cameras and
there is evidence that many of their successors were motivated at least in part
by the promise of instant mass-media notoriety…Just about every recorded
instance of mass murder given saturation coverage on US television is followed
by another mass murder, somewhere around the country, within two weeks.’
Research the
characters and make notes about them
Eric is a friend of quiet boy Alex who gets bullied in school – they both end up committing the shootings
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