Elephant: Work Of An Auteur review

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Elephant is a work of an auteur. It’s so original in its style that people used to conventional storytelling could feel uneasy, writes Bikas Mishra on Gus Van San't 2003 film.

A low angle shot, camera looking up at the blue sky as the clouds float by. A lamp post and electric wires create a perfect frame. Evening draws in and darkness envelops the beautiful sky however the camera remains steady, looking up to the summer sky as if the filmmaker is waiting for a cue from the heavens to tell his story. This is how Gus Van Sant’s Elephant opens. And this film is supposed to be on something as horrific as a high school shoot out.

Elephant is a work of an auteur. It’s so original in its style that people used to conventional storytelling could feel uneasy. One often felt as if the film is shot without a script and the filmmaker has simply spent a day in a high school and edited the footage. However the ease with which camera follows the characters and an un-underlined manner in which events unfold is not easy to achieve.

Gus Van Sant’s Elephant almost looks like a case study which doesn’t go out of its way to find a reason behind the things but in an impassionate way chronicles rather calm lives of students of a high school that’s destined to undergo a sea change. Although we know all along and the filmmaker gives us ample hints throughout about the shootout that's about to happen, his style is such that we don’t anticipate and even if we know that shootouts are happening, we don’t feel the need to feel anything.

The filmmaker takes us through the high school life through a cross section of students whose lives criss-cross and we keep coming back to the same event from different perspectives. However none of these lives are more significant than the other. Their stories happen to be told only because they fall in the gaze of camera and since they fall in the gaze of the camera we follow their lives till the end.

The camera moves effortlessly in the film and there are many long takes where camera follows characters usually from behind. The most remarkable such sequence comes towards the end when amidst the firing one black student Benny casually and without any signs of shock or fear goes to the shooter, only to be shot. A heroic walk to an unglorified death.

Elephant is one of such films where treatment takes an upper seat than the story. Everyone know what the story is about so much so that the director doesn’t even care to hide it in the turns and bends of the plot. One of my favorite scenes is where Alex, the shooter plays Beethoven while the other shooter Eric is playing a gory video game. Gus van Sant uses Beethoven’s this composition as a refrain throughout the film.

Another startling sequence that kind of sets the motion is the opening scene where the son takes over the steering wheel from his drunken father. Is this a comment on the society?

Why the film is called Elephant remains a question for me. My guess was that it refers to the story of the “Blind man and the elephant” where three (or four?) blind men interpret an elephant differently. However have found a better reason at IMDB that says that the title has been taken from a 1989 Television series “Elephant“ that "comes from the writer Bernard MacLaverty, who said that the Troubles were like having an elephant in your living room".

People could also find elephant little slow, wandering and not to the point. If you find it like that in the first fifteen minutes, my suggestion is don’t watch the movie at all. Elephant is an unconventional film that requires a different sensibility to savor it. If you don’t have it, you might find the film boring, arty and too intellectual.

For me, it’s an original piece of cinema much required in an era of jumping-the-gun style of filmmaking. An auteur’s work