Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989) (Patreon)

I suppose I've thought about Clarke's Elephant in the same way most cinephiles think about Wavelength. I know what it is. I know what it does. I know why it does it. How much more could I get from actually watching the film? Of course this attitude is always wrong, a way to justify one's own lack of curiosity. At the same time, there's not much about Elephant 1.0 that doesn't unfold exactly as advertised. A series of tracking shots follows various white men, all probably between the ages of 20 and 45, as they search the landscape or some cavernous building, eventually finding another living soul and immediately shooting them dead. 

Clarke mixes up the structure ever so slightly now and then, such that the first person we see in a few of the shots turns out to be the victim rather than the assailant. This is clearly part of the concept, since after awhile the viewer knows that someone is going to die, but can never be exactly sure who. The anxiety of watching Elephant then becomes a metaphor for life in Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles.

But I find Elephant a bit unsatisfying. This is mainly because Clarke is attempting to strike a balance between realism and abstraction, and I don't think it really works. The environments, the follow-shots, and the nondescript actors all suggest the sort of reflexive BBC social realism that dominated their 70s and 80s productions. But the fact that this world is emptied of other people -- no bystanders, no onlookers -- is clearly a formal conceit. It serves to decontextualize the killings, no doubt. But it also makes them meaningless. Yes, I realize meaninglessness is the point, that Elephant is about senseless slaughter. But as presented, these deaths are eerily prescient of first-person-shooter games, which makes Elephant read less as a senseless tragedy and more as psychotic pastime.

Also, I hate to nitpick, but the squib work in this film is terrible. Clarke devotes so much attention to the killings, almost always giving us a still shot of the dead man where he fell. But all this does is make us wonder why these corpses aren't oozing blood, why there are no spatters on the wall or the concrete, why these shootings are so antiseptic? I'm sure this has to do with BBC regulations, that Clarke had to consciously avoid any gore to get Elephant approved for production, much less broadcast. But this only adds to the nagging feeling that we are watching movie violence, and poorly staged movie violence at that. Since Elephant is realistic in most other respects, it's hard to take this as some meta-commentary on the representation of violence, so it just feels like a half-baked experiment.