Long takes: In this film, Gus Van Sant uses a lot of follow-through long takes. This kind of footage seems to let us also walk into the American campus, followed by the characters in each story, to look at the day of the shooting from a different angle. One of my favorites is that after the hero Eric came home, he sat down and played the piano. Accompanied by the classical music to Alice, the camera started a 360-degree circular motion. The slowly moving camera showed the environment in which Eric lived. , first a painting of a grimacing, twisted person (perhaps hinting at Eric's inner anger and pain), and then Eric's bed. . . Then there is another sketch of an elephant (here I click on the title of the movie, but what does the elephant want to express, whether it is Eric who wants to be an elephant, with the most powerful power, like no one in Germany Dare to be right with the Nazis) The camera is on Eric again, he is still playing, the camera starts to move around again, Alex enters Eric's house, sits on his bed, and plays a violent game of killing. Then, the camera is again on Eric, who suddenly increases the intensity of his playing, and slaps his middle finger hard at the piano. His anger exploded at the end of his playing, and the outburst was powerful. The beauty of this long shot is that while it is narrating, it also shows Eric's living environment and his inner psychological activities. I also really like the three long shots of the sky in the film, which appear at the beginning, the middle, and the end. At first, the weather was sunny, which seemed to show the beginning of the day; in the middle, the weather gradually changed from sunny to cloudy, suggesting that there would be a horrific shooting; the end, or a long shot facing the sky, represented that everything was over, and a tragedy followed the end. Narrative: The film tells a tragedy in a simple, restrained way. The first sixty minutes of the film were so bland, you might think that what happened in those sixty minutes was the same thing that happened in your school. The first half mainly records the behavior of the victims and perpetrators before the shooting, and the film does not make the film loose because it records the behavior of too many characters. It ties all the characters together, but tells the same story from multiple angles. In this way, the audience has a detailed understanding of the antecedents of the shooting, but it does make the first half of the film a little boring. But it is precisely because of the blandness of the front that the subsequent shootings are so powerful, forming a huge contrast with the ordinary school life in front of them. The characters in the story are so ordinary, even I can find their shadows in my own school, but this tragedy really happened in such an ordinary campus, and the distance between us and the story has also narrowed.
View more about Elephant reviews
