In An Elephant Sitting Still (2018), Hu Bo transforms us into the tag-along of a few high schoolers. These are often filmed from behind or at a 3/4 angle and they rarely face each other. There is no traditional coverage, no establishing wide shot, and no standard shot-reverse shot. Instead, the camera stalks the film’s protagonists in long Steadicam takes. We mostly see faces and backs. Space keeps receding in front of the characters. I call this filming style shadowing.
The close framing creates a sense that things are happening but the director is not organizing them and the actors don’t know what’s coming next. It’s a bit as if we are the wallflower who follows his more charismatic friend everywhere, always slightly behind him. A lot escapes our vision often blocked by his back or shoulders. There is no deep perspective and most of the time we don’t even see what the character in focus sees, only his reaction to it. When something happens to our charismatic friend, we are anxiously looking at him rather than at what is happening. We don’t pay attention to the places we are in, to the landscape, to anything but what befalls him.
This is the way people in love see the world. Reality recedes in a blur. One becomes unable to pay attention to anything except what is in our heads or just in front of us, one person at a time.
Either love or depression.
Soon after completing this film, Hu Bo took his life.
This way of filming was not invented by Hu Bo but it still registers as something new. If you read film criticism you may have come across Ray Carney's Two Forms of Cinematic Modernism: Notes Towards a Pragmatic Aesthetic. In this text, Carney distinguishes between what he calls the idealist view (Hollywood) and the pragmatic view (Renoir, Cassavetes, Leigh, etc.).
“In idealist film, the character plays “to” the camera and “for” the viewer; in the pragmatic film the character functions more or less independently of the camera position, playing to, for, and with the characters around him. The effect is radically to change the cinematic experience: The viewer isn't inside the characters' heads, sharing their perspectives, looking out through their eyes, but off to one side of them, looking at them, at a certain critical distance from them. The viewer is not in the scene living it, but outside it, overhearing it. The world exists not as a series of feelings to be shared and minds to be inhabited, but as a collection of bodies, voices, movements, and actions to be experienced. Merging becomes impossible; multiple views must be maintained”.
In this regard, An Elephant Sitting Still is definitely a ‘pragmatic’ film, but as we follow our back-packed protagonists, we realize that it also answers every definition of what an ‘idealist film’ is. We are clearly “off to one side of the characters” and yet, the story also has a progressive development with a final acme in pure Hollywood style. It feels paradoxically free in each scene but controlled as a whole. This might best be described as the feeling we have when playing video games.
From 1917 to Happening, a lot of recent films use shadowing but if we follow the trail of An Elephant Sitting Still back in time, we bump into another Elephant, filmed fifteen years earlier by Gus Van Sant.
Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which won Cannes’ Palme d’Or in 2003, is a prime example of shadowing. Like in Hu’s movie, we see a lot of backs except the camera trails a bit further and Van Sant’s high schoolers appear both in full frame and in close-ups.
In Elephant, genuine interactions between teenagers are rare blips punctuating endless wandering into a space that continuously recedes. Classrooms are garages where emotions are parked for a period before being put in motion again. Van Sant is right to insist on filming his characters walking in corridors. We all remember how important these were as high schoolers: corridors are transient spaces and adolescence is the time when life is felt most acutely as such. This is where hands touch and gazes meet.
Gus Van Sant’s camera follows his actors in continuous shots. The time it takes for a character to walk from point A to point B is fully recorded. Unlike Hu, Van Sant creates a specific space with his camera and it’s the real time taken to walk through this space that builds the film’s unique tension.
Van Sant understood that if continuity plays an important role, the space itself where the continuity takes place is even more important. While characters walk a lot in Elephant, they don’t go anywhere. Apart from the beginning and the end, all the action takes place inside one high school. It’s a closed world. Every corridor and classroom looks the same and it doesn’t matter which staircase one takes to go to the library until there are two armed shooters in the building.
Van Sant’s Elephant is directly inspired by the Columbine High School massacre and we know before watching the movie how the intersecting stories end. Every time a character’s trajectory crosses the path of another, we hope that, like in a pool game, their collision will set them on a new trajectory away from death.
Watching this film almost makes us beg for a video game top-down isometric view. We badly want to locate who is where and shout: Get out now! The effect of chance encounters has never been as extreme.
While An Elephant Sitting Still uses the same exact shadowing style, its power is lessened both because it takes place in an open space (all over a working-class city) and because the characters have a goal outside of it. They want to go to another city, Manzhouli, where it is said that a circus elephant sits still no matter how much he is harassed. When they finally take the bus for Manzhouli, the film dislocates.
By contrast, the teenagers in Elephant have no goals. They are just spending a day like any other at their school. Yet, their endless waddling creates not only the rhythm of the film but its whole structure. The enclosed space seems to dilate and contract with their displacement within it. it’s their walk that defines space.
But is shadowing really the cinematic offspring of video games? Van Sant said in an interview that he did not play them prior to filming Elephant and that he took his inspiration from a short film by Alan Clarke.
Guess what is Clarke’s film title?
We keep circling around something we don’t understand but which, nonetheless, gets passed along from director to director. Hu takes his shot by bringing the threads of four lives together in a happy ending. Hu tries to make sense of the senseless. By contrast, Elephant’s tragic ending remains meaningless. We feel the abyss. Meaning we understand that every single effort made by humans from raising a family to becoming rich to believing in God consists in creating a story that “makes sense” of life. But when life itself slashes our beautifully crafted stories, we become the blind men of the parable, facing something we are unable to grasp.
'An Elephant Sitting Still' is probably one of the most unknown Chinese movies yet one its best, and one of the world's most depressing. I loved it.