(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
This is the man who secured early cult status through films like Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My private Idaho (1991), which may have reached a tentative peak with Nicole Kidman in To Die For (1995), which went commercial with Good Will Hunting (1997) and Finding Forrester (2000) and not least left big flashing question marks after a remake of Hitchcocks Psycho (1998) which was just a picture-by-picture re-make in the literal sense. What is certain, though, is that his career both inside and largely far outside the American mainstream movie has assumed a slightly declining curve in recent years. However, that was before he showed up at this year's Cannes festival with the film Elephant, actually made as a TV movie for the American broadcaster HBO, and with it did something as unprecedented as winning the awards for both best film and best direction.
Common to almost all Van Sant's films is that they portray young people who are in the margins of society. They are often men who somehow do not fit or will be pushed within the norms society sets as ideal. A similar problem can be seen in Elephant where the director, through a coolly observant and almost documentary style, places us as witnesses to a Columbine-inspired high school massacre where two young boys suddenly one day show up at school armed to the teeth and start shooting around. Of course it is natural to let your mind fly in the direction of Michael Moore Bowling for Columbine which was just a kind of documentary on this subject, but on the other hand it must be stated at once that Elephant may be as far from Moore's journalism as possible. Because where Moore is truly an elephant in the glass magazine and merrily swinging the judges' club across the conservative United States with sarcasm and humor, we experience Elephant a movie that does not want clear answers and judge. Here, hardly any questions are asked at all, and the film deliberately derives its strength from the refusal to launch clear solutions that, in most cases, fall short and thus could emotionally drain the material.
Gus Van Sant's genius line lies in the observing camera and clip. With this he creates a quiet poetic atmosphere that in many ways replaces both characters and character driven action. We pursue different students through schooling in their everyday and irrelevant tasks. Eventually we see the same scenes from different perspectives and we slowly realize that what we see is a documentation of the last minutes of a series of lives before they are to change forever or end. Elephant is a film that almost stands out as pure directing. With character psychology and dramatic curves torn away, van Sant has dropped the conventional film for its most distinctive features and is left with a product that is all the stronger and more dramatic precisely because the audience is robbed of the sleeping pillows that the conventional storytelling techniques have become. Gus van Sant can in many ways be said to give the authority over his own emotional and thought life back to an audience that is usually imprinted all emotions doctrinally from canvas and speakers.
Of course, this does not mean that the film appears to be pointless, or indifferent. On the contrary Elephant a very political film that just brings out absurd features of American society by letting them be uncommented as part of the distanced portrayal. That is why US media were also quick to criticize the Cannes jury for acting politically by applauding an anti-American film at the lowest prices.
