Elephant (1993)
Directed by Alan Clarke
A chilling depiction of a series of violent killings during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
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What critics compared Elephant to
Along with the photographer William Eggleston and filmmaker Alan Clarke (whose 1989 TV film on Irish sectarian violence gave Elephant its title), the veteran American documentarian is cited by Van Sant as a major influence.
Filmed in long, languorous travelling shots (like Van Sant's Gerry, it's influenced by Béla Tarr, as well as the Alan Clarke film about sectarian murders from which the director took his title), sometimes slowing almost imperceptibly to savour a fleeting emotion, Elephant sucks us into the lives of some half dozen students.
The title comes from Alan Clarkes 1989 BBC short "Elephant," which is about school violence in Northern Ireland; Clarke is alluding to the saying that such a problem is as easy to ignore as an elephant in a living room.
It's ironic, perhaps, that shortly after Elephant's initial limited release in the States, Columbine authorities released a long sat-on videotape of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, with a couple of friends, target-practicing off in the woods.
(Hunger also qualifies as the most stylistically radical film about the Troubles since Elephant, a still-bracing nonnarrative 1989 short by the late Clarke.
The most obvious antecedents to McQueen’s movie are Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” and Alan Clarke’s plague-on-both-your-houses “Elephant”.
Nor is it the only attempt to distil the Troubles down to decontextualised snatches of brutality, as Alan Clarke did with his 1988 Elephant.
A repetition of gun murders ordered by Bobby’s brothers brings Allen’s direct shooting style close to that of Alan Clarke’s dispassionate “Elephant.”
Nor is it the only attempt to distil the Troubles down to decontextualised snatches of brutality, as Alan Clarke did with his 1988 Elephant.
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Broadcasts of fictional works by BBC directors like Mike Leigh (Four Days in July) and Alan Clarke (Contact, about British soldiers in South Armagh's "Bandit Country," and Elephant, a brutally minimalist depiction of 18 sectarian shootings, one after another) were routinely denounced by right-wingers who freely admitted not having seen them, then rescheduled in the wee small hours.