(This was to be my annual contribution to Metaphilm, but since it was posted here first in seed form last week it was not accepted.)


I have had a hard time putting my finger on the basic common denominator of Van Sant's Death Trilogy (Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days), but the last shot of Elephant clinches it for me. Van Sant referred to the film as a “thought machine,” in distinction to the then recent Bowling for Columbine, that would provide a way for viewers to reach their own conclusions about the causes of the Columbine massacre. In this respect, the film has been criticized for its attempt to displace instant moral response with the Bressonian pose of the two shooters - the initial Larry Clark-lite scenes of the two shooters a reprehensible narrative failure. I tend to agree with such criticisms, off-put that Van Sant would treat the Columbine massacre as a formal exercise. But such criticisms also fail to place key shots of Elephant in the broader context of the Death Trilogy, three films intent on exploring spaces related to death, real deaths, and their echoes in cultural memory. This context somewhat blunts otherwise legitimate criticisms of Elephant.


Much of the film in narrative time charts the last few minutes of the school before the shooting begins. Like Van Sant's last four films, the backbone of Elephant is the series of tracking shots of these high school students and teachers that intend to open up a background, to grant the viewer the sort of deep-focus access championed by Bazin, Toland, Kracauer, or any other verité aesthetic. There seems to be a lot of space for play in these films, at least a sense of detachment that permits us time to connect social and ideological dots not explicitly drawn or even shared by Van Sant. This sensibility is only enhanced by the title, that being the thing in the dark room of which we are all touching a different piece (cribbed from a 1989 film about similar killings in Northern Ireland). But I am beginning to think this is all a McGuffin. Van Sant is aware of the expectation related to his resolute use of these long tracking shots, often in close focus on a moving subject. They are passages in time, a filmed equivalent of reflection, movements through a space that comes to life in the screening process. (Bringing to mind Bresson’s classic statement: “My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”)


But Van Sant's passages in time involve characters that we know beforehand are on their way to death. In all three films we have the reverse of the determinism employed by Bresson in A Man Escaped. In the very title of the film we are told what is going to happen to the subject of his long tracking shots. The purpose of the film is not to discover whether a man becomes free or not, but to actually participate wholly in his efforts to obtain his predetermined freedom. Bresson just thumbs his nose at any cheap thrills provided by a less certain escape. Likewise, the course of Van Sant's tracking shots are predetermined. They are not open, they are movements through a space that has certainly contributed to the death of the film's characters but no longer has any influence over them. If Bresson thought his films “come to life again” through some of the same formal characteristics that Van Sant employs, but Van Sant’s films have a different teleology. His open spaces are all preludes to definitive, irrevocable endings. Though in other cases, such tracking shots open films up to us, as in the brilliant final sequence of Haneke's Code Unknown, Van Sant's tracking shots eventually shut the film down like a tetherball winding around its pole, a process set in motion right from the beginning. It would be a formal bait and switch if we didn’t know that Gerry dies, that all these kids at Columbine die, and that Kurt Cobain dies. In this way, Elephant is not just a distasteful formal exercise, but represents a genuine, awful, movement towards death.


This movement towards death is occurs in two ways.


1. The first is that these tracking shots are spatial movements linked to the physical movement of their subjects, and in each Death Trilogy film there is a continual movement towards physical death. This finality seems to conflict with the essence of the tracking shot, but that is Van Sant's tricky little McGuffin. Whereas at the end of 400 Blows the tracking shot concludes in a evocation of the life of its character beyond the film, Van Sant's shots end in death, leaving no other option for the film but the credits.


2.The second way this movement towards death occurs is that each film uses tracking shots to move their characters toward a mythological appropriation of their circumstances. In Gerry, the movement of dialogue farther and farther into the ridiculous idiom of its characters is a movement from the order of language to the chaos of their predicament. This movement towards abstraction is the purest sense of myth. In Last Days, the increase of Christological imagery pushes Blake towards his death, having passed through the Garden of pop culture hysteria, he lays down in a network of allusions. And then in Elephant the final tracking shot poses one of the shooters as a Nietschzean explorer, moving him through sharply configured space towards his final victims as he accumulates cultural associations. The noise of animals in a jungle in the background, the steady hold on his rifle in close focus, the military bent of his identity poses him as some sort of first person PC shooter on his way into Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It is in this final shot that we get a sense of the sense of mythical identity shared by the two shooters, one borne in gaming media culture and unconsciously linked to classic death fugues.


So in each case there is a literal movement towards death, as all these films are about the deaths of their subjects. And there is also a movement from reality to abstraction. This move towards the mythical countermands any verité conceptions that may have accrued by the film's end. In each case our prior conception of verité aspects of the tracking shot is subverted, denied, maybe even refuted. This use of such verité formulas in the virtual reconstruction of famous deaths is unsettling, as they unconsciously shift previous modernist conceptions of reality associated with cinema verité to emerging conceptions of reality and identity linked to those cultivated by journalism, gaming culture, and pop culture. All of this occurs in the spaces evoked by the Death Trilogy, the better context in which to watch Elephant.