Elephant

"Are you going the concert tonight?" There is a liquid serenity in the calm, ethereal simplicity of everyday life. We can look at life as it is, with its structures and routines, and we can say that it is mundane. We can say that it is boring, and that our living it is a chore in and of itself. The 9-to-5 work cycle, the education establishments until the age of 18, the cars and newspapers and bars and supermarkets and hellos and goodbyes - they're all here, they all decorate our lives and fill them. We don't remember most of them. We walk around a lot, but we're not graced with the memory of these walks. We just remember where we were walking to and where we were coming from. In this way, cinema compresses real life into a tiny, condensed version of its massive, expansive counterpart. Where life lasts for 80 years, a cinematic representation lasts for 90 minutes. Why, then, would cinema waste its' time on the in-between? Can cinema work if it only shows us the in-between? Is there a space in art for the banalities of contemporary existence? Gus Van Sant answers that question with stark confidence and awe-inspiring beauty: yes, yes there is. Elephant doesn't show us the cinematic version of life. The characters don't handily shove their backstories into the audiences ears. We wouldn't even conveniently learn their names and relations to each-other if it weren't for the title cards. This is true life. This is walking around for a long time with nothing going on, this is the quiet, dreamy existence of the human being in its purest form of cinematic representation. Why does it work? Because in these quiet, simple moments, they're transformed: where they would - for the thousands of times they were repeated before - simply be another forgotten second or minute or hour, now, they're the final moments of these characters lives. Van Sant takes the title of this film from the allegory about the blind men and the elephant. If several blind men all placed their hand on a different part of an elephant and were asked to describe what it was they were touching, they'd all report back different things. This is Elephant. What is the elephant in Van Sant's interpretation of the allegory? It's life itself - it's the stark violence that combusts out of the serenity of the everyday. Through different character's perspectives, we see the moments directly preceding the final moment: a school shooting. From the eyes of John, we follow him as he deals with his alcoholic father and ultimately arrives late for school. From the eyes of Eli, we see him taking some photos and developing them in a dark room. From the eyes of Michelle, we see her dealing with her gym class and the quiet bullying of others. These are their final moments, and this is how it happened. The cinematography is truly some of the best that cinema has to offer - so fluid and dream-like, the camera flows through the slow-motion halls like a liquid, capturing the beautiful minutia of life in a school. On top of the cinematography, however, is the sound design. This film is, perhaps, the best film ever for sound design. It's so enigmatic and endearing, so powerfully captivating and evocative, and so celestial and intense. Every single sound is magnified, intensified and softened. Every sound is at once a beautiful essay on life itself and, depending on what it's depicting, a terrifyingly powerful element of mania. It all culminates in this fantastic atmosphere that is unparalleled - schools have never been depicted with such realism and life has never been depicted with such wondrous awe. Gus Van Sant deserves serious accolades for what he's done here, and the way he's utilised the sound design and cinematography to capture the school shooting was a powerful statement indeed. So, where this film could have been a simple meditation on the banality of life, instead, it transforms itself into a love letter to life itself. The school shooting is bleak, realistic and harrowing, and that's because we saw, even in the forgotten moments of people walking from A to B, that life is definitely worth living and understanding and capturing and feeling and experiencing - when Eric and Alex go on their school shooting, they take away these people's singular ability to experience life itself, and it's the truest version of tragedy I know. Elephant is a masterpiece of cinema, because it captures the essence of cinema's importance to reality and questions cinema's inability to capture reality. Cinema isn't always an imitation, in fact, here, cinema is the reality, and that's why when the first gunshot is fired, it feels so much heavier, sounds so much louder, than any gunfire in a Schwarzenegger film.