A depiction of what at first seems to be a typical day at an American High School. Eli asks a punk couple to pose for photos. Nate meets with Carrie after football practice. John drops off car keys for his brother. Brittany, Nicole and Jordan gossip. But when John crosses paths with Eric and Alex the ordinary day changes...
Product Identifiers
Producer
Dany Wolf
EAN
5022153185514
eBay Product ID (ePID)
30592706
Product Key Features
Film/TV Title
Elephant
Actor
Alex Frost, John Robinson, Timothy Bottoms, Eric Deulen
Director
Gus Van Sant
Format
DVD
Release Year
2004
Language
English
Run Time
80 Mins
Genre
Drama, General
Additional Product Features
Certificate
15
Number of Discs
1
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States of America
Director of Photography
Harris Savides
Reviews
The Guardian - ...One of the best and most disturbing films of the year..., The Independent - ...An extraordinary, sublime piece of filmmaking that unsettles as it enthrals...
Additional Information
Gus Van Sant's drifty, eloquent, and effortlessly poignant ELEPHANT is loosely based on the massacre at Columbine High School. (On April 20, 1999 in Littleton, Colorado two 17-year-old boys fired semi-automatic weapons on their high school classmates, killing 13, injuring 25, and then taking their own lives.) Van Sant's film is set in Portland, Oregon and uses non-actors chosen from an open casting call of high school students. On a crisp, sunny Autumn day, with colourful leaves on the trees and puffy clouds drifting across blue skies, students arrive at school as usual. Eli takes photographs for his portfolio, John manages problems with his alcoholic father, Acadia attends a gay-lesbian meeting, Nate plays a game of tag football, and Michelle works in the library. Meanwhile, two outsiders, Eric and Alex, harbour hatred for their peers. Each of ELEPHANT's students have unique interests and personalities, and the film respectfully emphasises their individuality. It also demonstrates how school is an unpredictable blender where students' differences are constantly agitated. Harris Savides' excellent photography--shot in 1:33 aspect ratio, making the movie a cube in the centre of the screen--follows and floats, sometimes blurring and juxtaposing the light to achieve an ethereal mood; while Leslie Shatz's ambient sound design and a soundtrack of soft Beethoven piano music completes that feeling. The film is structured in brief overlapping chapters all taking place on the morning of the 11:35 A.M. attack. ELEPHANT won the Palme D'Or and Best Director at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.
We watch the day of a high school masacre unfold from the view point of a few students. The plot is non-linear and achieves its objective of showing the audience what happened by flitting back and forth between students and the two killers. The style is a slow moving, quiet narrative on a very plain canvas. This is to enhance the realism and show the film in the light of a documentary.
With so many tedious and boring long pans and tracks, it gets monotonous very quickly. You have to view the end of previously shown scenes over and over again, so that you know your back in time an hour or so. This could have been done a lot better and left me tutting everytime I was about to see to students say hello to each other for the third time.
The film is quite good but it could have been less annoying at times.Read full review
Excellent and disturbing vision of Columbine School Massacre.
Very powerful 4.5 star film. I enjoyed it as much as I was disturbed and terrified by it. Its fantastic, not overly gory and definitively worth a good watch. It will stay with you long after you have finished watching once you realise the terror experienced by those in the Columbine School Massacre.
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