Format:
1 DVD-Video (38 Min.)
,
farbig
Series Statement:
Alan Clarke at the BBC, Volume 2: Disruption
Uniform Title:
Elephant
Content:
Clarke takes isolated behaviour and the distilled physicality of reality to the greatest extreme in "Elephant". The title refers to the figure of speech about an ignored problem (the elephant in the room), but the film's aesthetic stringency could well evoke the parable of the blind men and the elephant: 18 pursuits that end in gun murder are shown in succession, through a series of long Steadicam takes without any exposition or narrative, and almost zero dialogue. For a viewer who does not recognise the unremarkable Belfast locales or the unnamed murders from news accounts, the anonymous action could remain unidentified as the Irish sectarian murders which, from actual incident reports and statistics, are what Clarke is dutifully reproducing. There are murders in a parking lot, by a pool, on a soccer field, in a gas station, in a home, in a warehouse - some swift, others involving heart wrenchingly futile pursuit, and all the protagonists nameless. Every one ends with a held shot on the murder scene, a forced contemplation in silence and sudden stillness. By the third or fourth, the viewer is primed to cringe at anyone walking anywhere, since the endpoint is always the same. The formalist rigour and factual basis distill the art and social concern of his work, and the film is the supreme manifestation of his experiments with withholding context towards the social purity of the physical event. Still, this is not to say that "Elephant" achieves some perfect realism (whatever that would mean), for clear decisions have been made for the almost mythical isolation of the murders: the occasional fish-eye lens, the lack of dialogue, and the deserted locations. [sensesofcinema.com]
Note:
enthält außerdem:
,
Open Air: Road (1989)
,
Alan Clarke: Out of His Own Light - Part 12 (2016)
,
engl. / UT: engl. für Hörgesch.
Language:
English
Keywords:
DVD-Video
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