Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Elephant
2003 · Gus Van Sant · Elephant on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera follow students from behind at their walking pace. (camera)
Savides glides the Steadicam a few feet behind heads and shoulders, corridor after corridor. You never get ahead of anyone and you never see where they are going.
Payoff: Your knowledge is kept exactly level with the person walking, which is the position the film takes on everything. In the reading: the seer (voyant). The reading calls these kids seers: people who look and keep moving but cannot act on what they see.
Watch the same corridors, library, and cafeteria keep coming back. (staging)
The school works as a labyrinth. Bodies pass through locker-lined passages, the cafeteria, the library, the fields outside. You learn the building by texture and turn, never by plan.
Payoff: You end up knowing the place the way you know a recurring dream, and the film never gives you a map. In the reading: asw-disconnection. The reading calls the school an any-space-whatever: a place that has stopped hosting action and become pure passage.
Listen to the corridor murmur swell and then thin out. (sound)
Shatz builds a dense ambient field out of crowd noise, footsteps, and room acoustics instead of a score. It rises almost to abstraction and then drops away.
Payoff: With no music telling you what to feel, the dread arrives through the acoustics of an ordinary building.
Listen for how unpolished the teenagers' talk sounds. (performance)
The cast is mostly nonprofessional Portland teenagers using their own first names and largely their own speech. Nobody performs a feeling and scenes end without making a point.
Payoff: The ensemble reads as observed rather than acted, which is what makes the school feel like a real place.
Watch the time-lapse clouds cut into the school day. (light)
Van Sant interrupts the corridors with near-abstract inserts of sky moving fast. Nothing in the story explains them and nobody onscreen looks up.
Payoff: The day gets lifted out of clock time for a moment, and the film turns contemplative without saying a word.
Once you have seen it
Watch for the moment two students pass in the hall twice. (structure)
The same stretch of the day gets crossed again from another student's vantage. A figure in the deep background of one take becomes the subject of the next one.
Payoff: If any moment can be entered again from elsewhere, no moment causes the next. The braid is the refusal of explanation. In the reading: series of time / peaks of present. The reading calls these peaks of present: several nows that coexist and refuse to line up into before and after.
Count how few cuts happen inside any single scene. (cutting)
Van Sant edited the film himself. The long take is the basic unit and the montage happens between blocks rather than within them, so scenes run to their own length.
Payoff: Nothing accelerates toward what is coming. The film withholds the forward push that would imply a reason for it.
Listen to Alex play Beethoven at the piano. (sound)
The Moonlight Sonata and Fur Elise are the only music in the film, and both are played inside the story rather than laid over it.
Payoff: High European art gets held in the same flat register as a walk to class, which is what makes it hard to place.
Watch how flatly the two boys' morning at home is staged. (staging)
Weapons arrive by mail, a video game runs, a shower runs. The domestic and consumer texture is shot in the same key as everything else in the film.
Payoff: The staging declines to mark them as different, and that refusal is what viewers have argued about for twenty years.
Carry this in: The camera stays a few feet behind a head, walking. It never gets ahead of anyone, including you.