Beethoven composed a piece of music on April 27th of 18 10, and gave it to his student Treize Malfati in the same year. 1876, this music was converted by marfa Ti and another German musician and released to the public. It's called Alice. According to textual research, the title of the song is mistranslated.
Today, people can't know the original name of this song. Just like people can't know who Alex and Eric are.
The beginning of the film is the sky, and the time under the freeze is going on several times faster than usual, but it is still calm. Large clouds flow like water. No trace. It's just that the sun has set.
The handset in the movie makes people feel the camera at all. The center of the film is people. In addition to people or people.
This day. John drove his drunken father to school to wait for his brother. Elias found several models to prepare his photography portfolio. Michelle is helping the teacher organize books in the reading room. This day. The drunken father waited for his son in the car. The young couple waited for the report together. This day. The three girls complained endlessly together. The black and white puppy jumped high in front of the blond boy. This day. There are more students living a quiet life at school.
Van Sant showed a surprising number of long sports shots in the film. He doesn't seem to be afraid of the audience falling asleep in the first half of the film.
A large part of the front of the film makes people feel as calm as the empty shot at the beginning of the film. The narrative structure of the film is complex and exquisite, full of tension. Different characters' perspectives keep repeating the time before shooting, showing an ordinary high school and an ordinary day without any words. First John, then elias. People change one by one, but time is always time. Hand-held machine close-ups of people's heads and sports long shots accounted for a huge proportion during this period. The audience can only see the actor's face, even the back of his head. The surrounding space is empty. Van sant told everyone in this extreme shooting way. The experimental object is human. It's people. It's people! People! People! Everyone's name is typed on the screen. If this is the treatment of the main characters in the film, the audience has memorized more than five main characters before shooting. Van sant also tells people the importance of everyone in this way. They have relatives and friends. Everyone has his own life. Van Sant also deliberately played up the moment when "everyone" and "everyone" met in life or even just passed by. When John teased the dog before meeting Alex and Eric, and Jordan passed by the three girls, the upgraded camera shot deliberately emphasized the meeting between people. Elias took pictures of John, while the director took three shots from the perspective of three people. This is also the most amazing part of the whole movie. In this process, the complexity and originality of the film narrative structure are exciting. John, Elijah and Lin Kewei are three intersecting lines. It is also the most important part of the narrative structure. One is a blond teenager who doesn't study well. One is a handsome guy who loves photography. One is an ordinary girl who is unknown and unobtrusive. If I make a far-fetched metaphor, I think we can say that John, who has poor grades and cares about his family crying in the room, represents a little rebellion, inner fragility and longing for his family. Elias, who gave up the concert for a photo album, represents the pursuit of ideals. Lin Kewei, who complained a little, finally accepted and enthusiastically helped the teacher, representing the most ordinary and unknown person. These three people have met before. Rebellion and ideal are good friends. The ideal reflects his appearance for the rebellious teenager, and ordinary people silently run past them with their heads down. When the unknown man died under the gun for the first time, the idealist took the photos he wanted before he died, even though he died. I saw my teenager and walked out of school. Towards a safer and broader world. We can say that all the characters in the whole movie actually point to these three people. Three complaining girls and lovers in sweet love are essentially the same as dusty Lin Kewei. Self-righteous rebellion or sweetness is actually unknown. And the principal is their adult version. Black people, like Elias, wanted to save everyone, but they died heroically at gunpoint. The man who kissed John who was rescued by a black man was actually the same person as John. They gave their love to others, but they were equally helpless and fragile, and they didn't even know that they had escaped from the side window. While clarifying these people, Van Sant told us the meaning of love. It is these people who brush their bodies again and again, supporting the complex and huge skeleton in the first half of the film. Three shots. Three people met while taking pictures. Two people met while shooting in the reading room twice. Shoot twice the meeting of three girls and that boy in the corridor. These people make mistakes again and again, which makes the structure of the whole movie extremely wonderful.
In this process, Van Sant has been emphasizing that everyone in your life has their own life.
The theme of the film is the school shooting, but the shooting didn't appear until the second half. After Alex was smashed with cream by his classmates, most people just thought he was a poor soft persimmon. What's more, what he recorded in the canteen notebook is actually a detailed murder plan.
The first half of the film was very well disguised, and it seemed that nothing really happened on this calm day. When John walks out of the campus and meets two people in strange clothes, people may start to be curious. Lin Kewei looked up and heard the sound of a loaded gun. Van Sant's flashback was successfully masked by the sound of the door lock. Alex is playing the piano in the room, and the music of To Alice begins. The camera skimmed the bright red graffiti on the wall three times. The sound of the piano has been uninterrupted, and I can hear that I am not proficient in playing, but I have no intention of stopping, especially when the camera is aimed at Eric who is playing computer games on the bed and pushed closer, the sound of the piano rings very firmly. When the camera switched to the screen, the music returned to the soothing beauty. Moreover, the computer games they play seem to be different from the first-person shooter games we usually contact. Your enemy is a group of people who have no resistance at all. In this way, Eric killed one unarmed person after another under the music, and these people didn't even have the strength to run for their lives.
Then the theme of the film began to emerge. Hitler's head, people holding the Nazi flag, did not take out a toy in the parcel sent. Plenty of ammunition, careful planning. Everyone finally understood that the shooting was about to begin. Everyone knows that two people are gay. If we look back at the previous school discussions, we don't understand the problem of homosexuality. I wonder if it is a far-fetched reason for their behavior.
When Alex said goodbye to his father, a light flashed unconsciously on his face, but it didn't stop anything.
"We are not happy at school." "The most important thing is to be happy," Alex said. "Yes," said Eric.
Eric's headscarf is too similar to the one in the lower left corner of the computer game. Alex's hat reminds me of holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. The rebellious Holden became an extreme Alex. The hat also changed from red to black.
As I guessed at first, Lin Kewei was the first person to be killed. And then continue one by one. There is also a machine in the camera to pull the head closer, and everything around, including the person being photographed, is empty. Those former "protagonists" have become vague and degenerate figures in the distance.
That black man is a strange figure, which even makes me think that he is called "elephant".
Eric was finally killed by Alex, and his face in the close-up collapsed. Alex walked into the empty camera.
The blank at the end of the film is full of tension. At first I thought it was just a feint to adjust the rhythm. I have been waiting for a final account. When you see the subtitles. I feel lost.
Among the characters in the whole film. Van sant didn't kill them all in the end. He saved two of them. Blonde John and the girl who kissed John when he was crying. These two people also appeared on the poster of the movie. This may be Van Sant's attitude, the power of love. I was thinking, if someone kissed Alex, So will everyone survive?
The story was born out of 1994, which shocked the whole country in the Columbine campus gun case. Two students rushed into the school with automatic weapons. After killing 12 students and a teacher, two students shot themselves. Many details of the film restored the news at that time. For example, the picture of one of the students drinking the leftover drinks of a dead classmate was once photographed by the school's monitoring. On this basis, the director added many elements. Homosexuality, school violence, gun proliferation, drugs. This calm movie contains too many elements that can't make people calm.
The title of this film comes from this. The word "elephant" comes from an Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty's metaphor about "problems appear but don't solve them". He said, "It's like having an elephant in your house. It is so huge that you can't ignore its existence. But everyone tacitly never talks about it, ignores it together, and soon gets used to it. " Such indifference and even discrimination will eventually aggravate the problem. Even if it is as docile as an elephant, it will have unimaginable power after being furious.
Homosexuality, school violence, gun proliferation, drugs. This calm movie contains too many elements that can't make people calm. Like Beethoven, Van Sant dedicated such a film to his students. Dedicated to all people.