Of course, this is not because the film is too bad, but precisely because the director described a tragedy so realistically.
Those bright colors soaked in the haze and cold, no matter how you look at it, it makes people feel heartache; and at the end of the film, watching the gunman pointing at the student couple to play "Dandouhua" game is definitely a painful torment.
The director who managed to create these unpleasant experiences was Gus Van Sant. In this unscripted film, he plays the role of long takes almost perfectly.
Santer once said, "I really like using the long takes to get the camera to follow the characters, but I don't know why." Whether Santer is humble or sincere when he says this, the long takes help him In "The Elephant", he successfully expressed the kind of deliberate detachment, rationality and calmness, and successfully brought the feeling of documentary into the feature film.
A long shot can avoid cutting the original complete time and space system into pieces, and it can also avoid expressing the director's subjective intentions too bluntly. And Santer deliberately creates a sense of reality in "The Elephant", just like the author of a suspense novel carefully sketching the background of his story. No matter how bizarre the plot, the author always wants the characters and events in his writing to look real, because only those stories that "make sense out of the unexpected" can best impress readers.
Behind the long shots, Sant is unusually calm, but always manages to manipulate the audience's emotions. He is always able to take multiple angles of people at the right time and place. This not only enhances the "sense of presence" of the film, making the audience feel as if they were there; it also has the effect of a montage-like technique - although the shots are continuous, because the shooting angle is always changing, the internal focus of the same shot The focus is always changing, and within the same long shot, there are constant contrasts and conflicts, conveying a certain emotion of the director.
If the classic montage is to use the fast and frequent switching of short shots to express the changes of different characters or environments in the same time and scene, then the technique used by Sant in "The Elephant" can be regarded as "long shot". Montage" - Through the switching of long shots, Santer tells about the different performances of different subjects in the same scene, and recombines different events that happened at the same time with the camera, which not only makes the story of the film reasonable and full, but also Keep the audience's attention by creating suspense.
Such multi-angle, motion-changing long shots are like the portrayal of characters in suspense novels. In the first half hour of "The Elephant", he opened several clues at the same time. By switching between long takes, Santer manages to tell several stories in different places at the same time, and eventually weaves the threads around the shooting into a coherent whole. In this way, although "Elephant" is always full of suspense, it can achieve a rigorous and complete structure.
There's no bullshit in Sant's long shots.
"All scenery words are love words." Although Sant can't directly add adjectives and adverbs to the objects in the long shots, he can still use the scenery in the long shots to influence the audience's mood, because these scenery are full of symbols and metaphors .
In Sant's long shots, the beautiful scenery and bright colors of the campus and beyond are repeated. But above this youthful and energetic scene, there is always a listless and pale sky. The surging clouds in the sky not only explain the changes of time, but also create the atmosphere of the film. And when the bleak sunlight was finally completely obscured by the surging clouds, heartbreaking gunshots rang out on the campus.
In the same film, Sant not only successfully rendered the splendor of youth, but also successfully destroyed the beautiful longing in the audience's heart with naked cruelty; not only can he restore the cruelty that has passed so vividly, but also use the truth The brutal and ruthless mockery of the audience's classic definition of the Mood for Love. Behind these seemingly cold and heartless long shots, Santer repeatedly questioned the conscience of each audience through his consummate narrative techniques: Who turned the garden into a cemetery? Who turned angels into demons again?
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