About "Elephant," raised in the "Night and Fog" thread re its tracking
shots, coincidentally, I saw it last night. They were all set to project
it in 1.85:1 when I informed the student who I took to be Doc Films's
"show manager" that it was 1.33, he ran off to his computer and soon
told me that he had "looked it up on google" and I was right, so they
showed it in the correct aspect ratio, perhaps for the first timer in
Chicago. I mention this because Doc is showing it once more on Sunday at
2 PM (see http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/calendar.html and
http://docfilms.uchicago.edu/calendar.html#weekend), though I would
advise any interested Chicagoans to arrive early and once again ask
about the aspect ratio they're planning to show it in and if it's 1.85
be prepared to tell them this whole story and to fix it.

I have no "Shoah"-like objections to "Elephant," though "Shoah" does
suggest the interesting thought experiment of imagining what the film
would have been like had van Sant always cut away just before a gunshot,
as he does early on. But the violence of the killings seems relatively
understated, actually.

After seeing it, I searched for reviews and in addition to reading
Jonathan Rosenbaum's excellent Reader piece, found two additional
intrusting reviews by members of our group that were all originally in
print publications and are all. Given that I don't find the writing of
most film critics useful, I'm impressed, especially since I didn't do
that exhaustive a search. The other two are by Phil Fileri at
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/10/24/3f98dac6235fd?in\
_archive=1
and Sam Adams at http://citypaper.net/articles/2003-11-20/movies.shtml

I guess Jonathan's response was closest to my own (and his review can be
found at http://www.chireader.com/movies/archives/2003/1103/031107.html)
The sense of incompleteness seems key to the film. Thus I don't
completely agree with Phil's angry objection to the hints of "causes"
(Nazism, video games, gun culture, etc.) because I didn't think the film
was telling me those *were* the causes so much as disparaging the media
theory of them as causes (every one of them had been mentioned in press
accounts), though one of the film's many rough edges is that van Sant
doesn't indicate all that precisely that he is disparaging these as
causes either.

I liked the film more than I expected to, though I don't think it meets
my most stringent tests for great film art. What I particularly liked is
the way the tracking shots seemed to imprison each kid, or group of
kids, in their own subjectivity, a point I didn't see mentioned
elsewhere. We follow a boy from behind as he walks through the school,
and we are trapped in his world, and feel how he is trapped in his
world, how everyone else flits by him like unknowns, and how everyone
is, denying community and accounting for how no one understands anyone
else. If I didn't miss-see the film, on the third repletion of John and
Eli's hallway meeting we see the shy girl who's afraid to wear shorts
passing them, but we hadn't seen her at all in their previous two
encounters. Is that true? If so, van Sant has even blocked his scenes
subjectively, suggesting how the two "dudes" meeting up as pals don't
even see her, since the first two presentations are from their points of
view.

The three girls who barf together are admittedly stereotypes, but the
footage of them contributes to this point, as with the boy-girl couple
who walk together and eventually hide in a cooler, as with the
photographer. The film interested me as being about the way the trap of
the self creates an the absence of community. Thus John is stuck in his
life with his drunken father and the principal makes no attempt to
understand that at all, and thus his crying scene becomes important, as
does the girl who tries to help but who has to go anyway when he won't
let her in. Long takes with camera movements often place characters in
broader contexts, as in for example Mizoguchi; here they are about the
characters' self traps, a phenomenon that (so I have heard: current or
recent high school students are welcome to contribute here) accurately
describes current American high schools. But it does not describe my own
-- which was admittedly an unusual one: the Bronx High School of
Science, a high school only founded in the late 1930s, already counts
five physics Nobel laureates among its alumni, making it de facto
unusual. Sorry for the school pride here, but what I experienced was a
bunch of 60s kids (my years there were '61-'64) fascinated by the world
more than by themselves, passionate not only about mathematics but also
about history and politics and art. Not that there aren't kids like that
today, because I have known and do know some, and not that there weren't
ridiculously self-absorbed kids at Bronx Science, of course, but the
"paradigm" seems to have shifted.

So at any rate I see these cinematically-depicted self-absorptions as
the "explanation" the film offers for the shooters: one boy is "into"
photography, an unseen kid is into tormenting his classmate with gobs of
goo, and two others (including the tormented one) are "into" guns and
killing. This is not to say the film is perfect, and in a lot of ways I
find it troubling, but it's certainly very good.

- Fred C.