SUBLIME CINEMA #698 - ELEPHANT
Alan Clarke was an underrated great of British cinema, although he directed very few features. Mostly his work was short, serial or made for television, and some quite hard to track down. His great films include 'Scum' (featuring a young and pre-grizzled Ray Winstone), 'Rita Sue and Bob Too', and one of his final films, 'Elephant.'
Elephant still shocks. It's a 38 minute kill spree, featuring strangers laying waste to strangers, taking place during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The film relies on long tracking shots (a hallmark of Clarke's work) and title refers to a description of the conflict as 'the elephant in our living room', meaning most people were in denial, and had managed to manufacture ways to accept daily violence and live around it. Clarke's film was about facing it.
Clarke's contemporary David Leland described a profound realization while viewing it the first time, and he has since written about it as one of the most important films of his life. He was disturbed by the endless parade of violence he was seeing on screen. "I remember lying in bed, watching it, thinking, 'Stop, Alan, you can't keep doing this.' And the cumulative effect is that you say, 'It's got to stop. The killing has got to stop.' Instinctively, without an intellectual process, it becomes a gut reaction."
Gus Van Sant adapted this film and appropriated its title for his feature about Columbine, with much the same approach.
