Elephant the movie Essay -- essays research papers

Gus Van Sants Elephant was at once critically praised and denounced by both film reviewers and filmgoers alike. The cinematography takes you on a waltz throughout a seemingly typical day at an unnamed tall school, stopping through the journey to focus on the stereotypes of school. The jock, the quirky artist, the cliqued girls, the skateboarder, they are all represented and representative of his film. Van Sant created a film, seemingly without a staunch opinion on the horrors of the columbine shootings. The movie seems distanced from the actors and their actions an asleep participant from the tranquil introduction to the gruesome climax. His seeming lack of a solve, lack of a reason for the creation of this film, is exactly the impetus that drives its core meaning. The high school was as stereotyped and typical as possible, a campus where everyone swears theyve visited once in their life. The visceral climax is at once both slowly make up to inevitability by the characterization s of the assailants, yet it also strikes the school suddenly and without warning. Van Sants film is a series of seeming contradictions and paradoxes that create the colour that he has no stance on the Columbine shootings. His stance, however, is given away in the purposelessness of the film the idyllic simplicity of the school, and its subsequent destruction, has no purpose. The Columbine massacre had no purpose. Gus Van Sants aestheticized school builds up a introduction that seems tangible to most students. He carries every right to create his avow world and tear it back d aver. It is this beauty that he creates that makes the film so much more shocking when it ends. Aesthetic world is the concept of accepting domain as unchangeable therefore, one must find the beauty that is inherent in everyday life instead of attempting to create beauty. The idea is that aesthetic realism sees all reality including the reality that is oneself, as the aesthetic oneness of opposites, (Siegel ). In other words, life is at once changing and the same. For example, someone is the same soul when they wake up in the morning and the same person when they go to sleep at night. They havent changed. However, there have still changed as a person throughout the day, at least minutely. Change and stability both occur simultaneously. At the same time, Siegel states that it sees the largest purpose o... ...e what can be considerably related to they wouldnt be considered stereotypes otherwise. The beauty that is created during the first hour, which is denounced by Foundas as unrealistic, is subsequently destroyed in the climax. To create and destroy mediocrity would not be as stirring a rendition as Van Sants recreation of perfection coupled with his systematic disposal of it. Gus Van Sant has created a world of high school that has every stereotype. He manifests a sense of beauty in every shot he creates, with the slow arcing camera shots combined with the agreeable caricatures of the students. He finds the aesthetic realism in high school, the elegance inherent in aspects of campus life, and constructs a film around it. It is his own right to create his own view of high school, and while critics can disagree, they should not debase. The initial purposelessness should only be taken at face value it is the lack of purpose in the beginning of the film that makes the lack of purpose in the massacre more obvious. There was no reasoning behind the Columbine shootings, they were a tragic occurrence that had little logic behind it. However, Van Sants film had purpose underneath its exterior.