Amy Taubin, “Part of the Problem”
1. Rather than answering specific questions about the interview, provide your own reactions to Van Sant’s comments on one or more of the following topics in relation to our in-class discussions/debates about Van Sant and authorship:
--His explanation of why he remade Psycho.
Van Sant discussed when he was in a studio meeting he brought up a question concerning why directors would want to remake a forgotten film, which would, in doing so, “grave-rob” the directors original work and create something new for an audience that didn’t understand the original, the inspiration. This isn’t fair for the original director and gives no chance for the new director to be understood in comparison to the original director. In remaking Psycho, a film everyone knows and loves, Van Sant was able to show off his different directorial vision, even with a shot for shot remake. Though the films look the same, they feel completely different, and thats because of the change in director. Because audiences know the original Hitchcock version so well, they are able to point out the apparent differences when watching Van Sant’s version, allowing people to actually witness a change in the film with the change in director.
J.J. Murphy, “The Temporal Complexity of Elephant”
Why did Van Sant consider the traditional screenplay format restricting? What alternative models for storytelling did he turn to for Elephant, and what specific techniques did he use in developing the film’s narrative and style?
Van Sant argued that with a traditional screenplay, the filmmaking process is far more restricting because there is no room for the “fun stuff”. With a screenplay, a director becomes so focused on copying and transferring everything in the correct manner that there is never any time to sit back and interpret it as it is presented. Once again, there is no time for what Van Sant calls the “fun stuff”. Van Sant chose to cast non actors—in the style of neo realist films—in order to create a stronger sense of reality. Feeding more into this reality, Van Sant threw out the script and approached the film in a more formal way of handling situations as they came about. He also layered the film to create a sense of events happening simultaneously in a medium of real time, in turn giving the audience this sense of temporal complexity.
Given that the film seems to have three acts, how is the second act of Elephant different than most conventional Hollywood screenplays?
The second act is different because at the end of the first act we are introduced to the two killers entering the school. This scene of Alex and Eric changes everything, creating a definite tension in the film. One would expect the second act to be the massacre, but instead it goes back in time to continue on in tracking the development of the characters before the massacre, which ends up not occurring until act three. Because of the unusual back and forth narrative of Elephant, the shooting doesn’t happen in act two, but is instead introduced. The film continues on with its narrative to address the underdeveloped stories before entering into act three, the massacre.
What does Murphy suggest is “one of the startling and largely unrecognized aspects of Elephant’s time frame”? What observation does Murphy make about the use of time in the third act?
The aspect of the time frame that Murphy brings up concerns the shot breakdown. There are just as many shots in the third act as there are in the first and second combined. Obviously, the pacing of the third act has increased in comparison to the slow first an second. Another observation that has been made is that the violence that is carried out in the third act lasts about twelve minutes, which is very similar to the fifteen minutes of violence that took place during the Columbine massacre.
In terms of character development, how is Elephant similar or different than Hollywood and most independent films? What specific strategies does Van Sant use in relation to revealing character? How do these strategies relate to the themes associated with high school experience?
Murphy points out that the movie is ultimately not character driven, leaving little room for any kind of character development. The development that is included, however, is spaced about the movie because of the temporal complexity of the narration, which makes it similar to other Hollywood movies since development happens throughout the entire movie. It is mentioned that simply watching a character provides plenty interpretation for many viewers, and Elephant succeeds in this by literally following these characters around with the camera. However, there is a disconnection in high school that is presented with the same long tracking shots from behind, all of which occur in the mundane prison-like building that is called high school.
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