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Infected, you must go through the stages of the disease one by one to the end; it is obvious. Like continuing a movie to the end when you have bought a ticket. And in my opinion, it is like the continuation that the attendees in “Elephant” are also experiencing it and naturally carry it on; willingly or unwillingly.
But isn’t it that continuation brings habit with it? In other words, when you are drawn to it and it has spread to you, then you are already a desirer of it – willingly or unwillingly; isn’t it?
Question: Why are we and do we remain in the film? Is the unpleasantness, which occurs when you did not expect it, a reason for us to stick to the image? Are we attracted to it and allow it to spread to ourselves? Because we want to understand more and clarify our position with the initial unpleasantness? Like or dislike? Or the other way around: Is it not that we have been infected with the image before watching what seems unconventional? In the midst of an intrusive volume of illusion, at a time that is not on the line of durability, surprisingly and sharply, you are pushed to the other side of the curtain/fantasy/reality and at first it comes attractive and then unbelievable; So, do we see and continue to return beautifully to the starting point? Maybe a miracle happens and the filmmaker tells us that it was all a dream? “For some of us ‘The Troubles’ is the elephant in our living room”; This is how it starts. It is somehow marked – both the text and the way it is written – that we are almost sure that we will be combined/solved with elements that are forever neglected, undecoded, and personal, as if you have taken a strange influence from someone else’s private habit and do not know, for a few more minutes. Double curiosity. So movement – to understand? -, into a captivating space; placement of – arranged or not arranged – objects in the environment (buildings, street lights, cars, …) and their distance from each other – in relation to each other and their relation to the whole environment -, long view of the corridor, confused wandering on the edge of the pool and a little more wandering and more speed and colors and themes and … shooting.
The killer leaves. We remain – along with the image – with the victim. Very normal. As if the most common and ordinary event in the world had happened. The next scene, another murder; the next scene, another murder; the next scene… The surprises continue… But is it simply the surprise itself that has shocked us? Just because we were surprised? Because it was fast and quick? Because it was engaging and captivating? Because it was continuous and striking? And because what and what and what…
A little thought, it seems to me that the word “shocked” does not do justice. Maybe it is not even the right word. The truth is that the author feels a sense of familiarity with the space that the English filmmaker has created in a complex, inexpressible and personal way, from his correct timing and how he digests and rides on it, to his difficult rhythm, the type of information he gives, the mode and geography that he has chosen for the time of filming at certain times of the day, his focus on the sound of walking and the pixel-by-pixel repetition of such sounds and the fundamental formation of the technical aspect of the film on this basis and also that familiar noise of the sound of silence and the process that was experienced during construction and many of us have spent it in our most private and private times: by watching the videos we have taken, from the most private and private parts of our lives. I am shocked, and suspicious of myself, from this amount of feeling of closeness, in this shared experience of bleeding; in this excitement that has been created from continuing our desires and pleasure that is not, but we are certainly willing and willing to observe; we are indecisive at first and have ambiguity and we may also suffer from this ignorance, but later we love this ambiguity – and the torment – and we want to watch only the film – read the killing – without any challenge; the same thing the filmmaker is doing – watching, without the need for explanation and analysis. We love “Elephant” the way it is, and the most important question that can be asked is why we should love such a film the way it is? Home? It’s dangerous, isn’t it? And maybe that’s why I’m shocked; and probably just that: the excitement to continue. Why am I excited?
It is interesting that “Elephant” is not really following the author’s dominant taste, the author of this article. I don’t see why I would want to sit down and watch a package of how-to-kills with my snacks and lemonade. Besides the strategy of how to present its plot and the star I can stick on its chest from this point of view, it does not have that obsessiveness that I am looking for and I enjoy, and it is not that much in the limit of masterpieces… The filmmaker has not understood – or maybe even experienced – sticking to a straight line like crazy; while it could and demanded that it act this way. He has created the structure meticulously and calculatedly, but he does not act in it calculatedly and from the map. There is a lot of confusion. Once he makes a long pause on a piece of actor’s act, and once he passes from a similar objective reconstruction of the same piece. Sometimes he takes a close-up of the killer’s face and sometimes he shows him from behind. Until a certain point, he starts his episodes with the killers and from a certain point on with the victims. He has created the impression of being a structural film to some extent (perhaps of its transformed surrealist type) but he does not neatly arrange his chic coat in a masterly way, and he childishly moves it away from himself; not that it is not good or excellent, no; but it is far from the skill that a master can scrutinize a phenomenon and implement it on the blackboard with exemplary precision. Of course, that – I emphasize again – the focus of being a first-class student is still in place. The God-given care of an artist – of his work – that specifically emanates from a culture, from an Environmental Symbiosis, and from a sensitivity that has grown out of necessity, and is understood. But – I emphasize this again – it is a little more scattered than my expectation, which demands concentration; and only a little.
In fact, from my point of view, the film is more of a continuous amateurism than anything else. It continues to develop moment by moment and piece by piece (it doesn’t really become complete because it never ends; more accurately: it becomes bigger and bigger). It is amateurish because: look at the way the special effects are implemented, in the way of shooting and making us believe it; it stays within the limits of its ignorance until the end and does not progress (put this aside from the long time it took to make the film; every morning and every morning and… compared to a short film, it is a big job. And now, in all this time, does it mean that there really has been no change? The last one is the same as it was on the first day?!). And it is continuous because: it does not back down. It does not surrender the fatigue of its days to becoming bad. It is stubborn to be whatever it wants and in whatever conditions it wants. And if it does not have the means, it will collapse under all those clumsy and awkward similarities that from the beginning it had laid the foundation for climbing them and reaching nowhere. Laziness and incapacity. Have you noticed? The characters sometimes run!
And now, when this dynamic amateurism, in my view, is mixed with the innate and environmentally derived precision, the filmmaker’s unknown and unknown extremism, which is both cinematic (successful in creating excessive conflict and drawing the audience into its almost raw setting, and drawing from everything – image, sound, movement, etc. – a creative and ambiguous sketch – what the artist enjoys seeing), and non-cinematic (killing for no reason, and killing, and killing. As if a gamer is experiencing it; or a nervous teenager is nurturing it in his fantasies), for me it becomes – I am talking about the mixing of these – a kind of inner devastation and a kind of theoretical confusion, attributed to a question that had not been of concern to me before and a new film from an old world has accidentally placed it on the table, and the answer is only for you the desire to see it again and again; even though you know there is no answer. So much so that in the end it makes us repeat our initial question: Why? Why should we nurture this passion?
Alan Clarke’s work strangely confronts me with a quote from his fellow countryman, Aldous Huxley: “Art arises from the need to give order.” Yes… perhaps “Elephant” is the result of this need, from the heart of the problem and nuisance that appeared in the middle of the hall of the filmmaker’s and his actors’ house and they were forced to make a film to express it. Yes; perhaps we should sit down and think about how they had an elephant in the living room of their house……