"Elephant" (1989, Alan Clarke) (Patreon)

No rating, because anything under 45 minutes I designate as a short, and those don't get a numeral*. But I liked it. (Flashback to a long-ago conversation with my friend Matt; we were talking about Kubrick, I asked whether he likes Clockwork Orange, and he kinda cocked his head to one side and asked "Do I like it? I mean, it's a masterpiece, but...") Was not bowled over, though, and I wonder whether I would have been had I not known exactly what to expect, via discussions of Van Sant's Elephant 20 years ago. This is about as strictly conceptual as movies get, and clearly it's meant to inspire steadily growing horror and agitation and disbelief as it just keeps going on and on and on like that, without ever introducing a narrative or even a character. I've engaged in a running philosophical argument with one friend/peer (I'll let him out himself in the comments if he wants to) who rarely sees any film without having read extensively about it beforehand, and prefers it that way; knowing what'll happen, he says, frees him to focus on formal aspects (which are his primary interest) from the get-go. And most of us, myself included, enjoy rewatching favorite films, despite sometimes knowing them by heart. So what difference does it really make if foreknowledge transforms your first viewing into something more akin to your second viewing? "Elephant" strikes me as an ideal example for rebuttal. Because I knew going in that it would consist of nothing but context-free murders, it was impossible for me to have the purely visceral experience intended (the memory of which, I contend, always informs subsequent viewings). Instead, my primary reaction was "Yep, this is what everyone described." There wasn't a whole lot left for me to perceive, really.

On the other hand, I knew going into James Benning's 13 Lakes that it'd be static shots of 13 lakes, and nonetheless enjoyed seeing the specific compositions he crafted. Same deal here—Clarke uses the Steadicam more adroitly than anyone since Kubrick in The Shining (to similar effect, actually), and he keeps us in a perpetual state of anxiety by switching perspectives without any discernible pattern , so that we're never entirely sure, until the moment that a gun is produced, whether the man we're following is assassin or victim. And I was struck, to a degree that I hadn't anticipated from any description, by how utterly devoid of anything we might call "entertainment value" almost every murder is. There are a few instances of the victim realizing what's about to happen and trying to run, which provides the sort of superficial excitement one expects from movies and television; in the vast majority of cases, though, someone just walks up to someone else and wordlessly shoots him, either once or multiple times depending upon the weapon, and then walks away. Which I imagine is true of most real-life murders. They're perfunctory. We don't even get Tommy DeVito seeing the empty room and having a split second to say "Oh n—" It makes these horrific acts feel unusually/appropriately small and futile and meaningless. (And now I've undermined that aspect of the film for those of you who haven't seen it!) 

Of course, there's also a great deal of walking on view, and I must say that, despite Gerry's couple of blatant Béla Tarr lifts, I hadn't expected "Elephant" to be such an enormous and direct formal influence upon Elephant. Van Sant really does just replicate a lot of these traveling shots, albeit to very different (and repugnant, in my lonely opinion) ends. Those of you who know that Elephant received my vanishingly rare 0/100 (twice) may wonder why I don't likewise despise "Elephant," which is after all much more violent. But that's just it: I'd much rather watch 18 people get gunned down, one by one, than watch dozens of kids not quite get gunned down yet, not yet, they will soon though, we're just gonna keep circling back to right before the carnage happens for over an hour. Clarke's vision (which I had no idea he'd crafted in conjunction with Danny Boyle, then working as a BBC producer) is deeply despairing, and hard to stomach, but it's not playing that sadistic game with the lives of its victims. And that's what I find obscene. No need to engage me on that point should you (very likely) disagree; as I noted when I posted some ancient nerd-group stuff to Letterboxd, I've already had this debate with the best and the brightest, who failed to persuade me. Just clarifying why this "Elephant" doesn't have anything like the same repellent effect, before somebody inevitably asks. Indeed, I might have loved it ("did I love it?"), had I encountered it tabula rasa and been truly taken aback. 

(By the by, this review, like my thoughts on Bo Burnham: Inside, is an exclusive for you Patreon subscribers. I don't log shorts on Letterboxd, so it'll never get transferred there. Maybe to my site someday.) 

* Why not? one might justifiably ask, since I always stress that the number merely signifies my enthusiasm level and doesn't purport to be any sort of quality assessment. Mostly, it's because I don't watch enough shorts to have developed any real sense even of my own taste when it comes to the form. I'm just not a short-film guy, the presence of two shorts on my Sight & Sound ballot notwithstanding. (Renoir's "A Day in the Country" is really an unfinished feature, but Tscherkassky's "Outer Space" is pure avant-garde short.) Don't really enjoy 'em much, rarely seek 'em out, wish Letterboxd would create a length-based filter so I don't have to scroll past half of everything that some of my friends log. Point is, it'd be as if I'd tried rating the first dozen or two movies that I ever saw on the 100-point scale. Very haphazard. (As is, my initial ratings from 2002 now mostly seem off to me. And I'd seen thousands of features by that point, obviously.) At 38 minutes, "Elephant" is admittedly close to my semi-arbitrary borderline, so I'd have an easier time rating it than I would rating something that runs a mere three minutes, but when I set a boundary, I stick to it.