Dossier spécial
Je viens de voir le film : je n’y emmènerai pas mes élèves! Des spécialistes de l’image pourront peut-être y voir un deuxième ou xième degré génial, mais je crains que la majorité des élèves, comme moi, s’y ennuie. La « Lettre à Elise », les plans de nuages, les personnages de dos parcourant des couloirs : tout cela m’a semblé horripilant; la construction en spirale, montrant le même événement vu de différents points de vue, serait intéressante si elle montrait quelque chose, mais il ne se passe rien, les dialogues sont creux, les acteurs trop conscients de la caméra dans leur dos, et les faits n’ont même pas de rapport avec la réalité, ou si peu…. On n’apprend rien, on ne comprend rien, et on n’a même pas envie d’y réfléchir tant l’ensemble du film semble incohérent…
Si, comme moi, vous avez étudié les faits en 1999, puis emmené des élèves voir Bowling for Columbine l’an dernier : restez-en là ! Ce midi, le lendemain de la sortie officielle du film en salle, les infos de plusieurs chaines françaises présentaient un film des tueurs s’exerçant au tir en forêt : la sortie de ce film d’amateur juste au moment de la sortie du film en salle semble aussi être une publicité de mauvais goût. J’avais espéré que l’on aurait des documents culturels utilisables, sur la vie dans une High School américaine : même pas! Ni la linguistique, ni le culturel ne sont utilisables… Bref, ceci n’est bien sûr que mon opinion perso….
Official site
see the page with the trailers, synopsis, and Diane Keaton’s comments
http://www.elephantmovie.com/production/9diane.html
http://www.elephantmovie.com/
On the Café
here is the special report from Le Café in June, when it received the prize. You will find there where the title comes from and what it means.
http://cafepedagogique.studio-thil.com/lemensuel/lenseignant/languesvivantes/anglais/Pages/2003/36_accueil.aspx
Comments
On Rotten Tomatoes (50% for and against…) comments written by American people who saw the film.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/Elephant-1123443/
A critic
« There are various angles one could take on the massacre: one could simply say it was a tragedy, cutting down young people in their prime; one could blame guns, or videogames, or bad parenting, or the competitive nature of US schools; one could see it in terms of the high-school idyll and fetishisation of youth that’s so much a part of American culture; one could see it in wholly abstract terms, as an event that can only be described, not dissected, part of the inexorable flow of Life. The trouble is that ELEPHANT does ALL those things, jumping from one to the other. »
http://leonardo.spidernet.net/Artus/2386/tor03.htm
A negative comment
« He takes real events, slightly alters them so as to avoid the need for historical accuracy, adds a homoerotic twist, and expects that the sight of blood will be enough to leave us feeling that this was an important film. »
http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=8236&reviewer=1
A negative critic from the Guardian
« But the winner [ of the Palme d’or], Elephant, was also loathed by
American critics. Many were suspicious of the way it appeared to exploit a sensitive issue for the purposes of arthouse shock tactics – and incidentally represent two American boys as quasi-terrorists. »
http://film.guardian.co.uk/cannes/story/0,13266,963589,00.html
A comment from a gay teenager from an adjacent school
« I felt sorry for the characters in Van Sant’s gay-straight alliance (which wasn’t actually in place at Columbine until after the tragedy), but the kiss between the killers struck me as misplaced and unnecessary. »
http://www.advocate.com/html/stories/899/899_kim.asp
More information about this controversial scene
« the tenderness and mystique of Elephant is often betrayed whenever Van Sant moves too far from the implicit to the explicit. »
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=817
Reviews
A review from the BBC : « And Elias McConnell, who plays a student interested in photography (called Elias), added: »I wasn’t affected in the same way because I’m home-schooled. But it scared me and made me happy I don’t go to high school. »
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3038449.stm
A commentary from Indiewire (independent films)
« Most provocatively, the director employs a Rashomon-like chronological method in which a few structuring events are seen three different times, say, from the perspective of three different characters. »
http://www.indiewire.com/movies/movies_030521eleph.html
Explanation for Rashomon : it refers to a film from Kurosawa, and means that : « The search for the correct viewpoint which is superior to all other viewpoints is an error in itself. »
http://www.foreignfilms.com/films/1735.asp
http://www.dailyrepublican.com/kurosawa.html
From Rotten Tomatoes
http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com/movie-1123443/reviews.php
From Plume Noire
http://www.plume-noire.com/movies/reviews/elephant.html
From Talk cinema (with interesting comments against the film)
http://www.talkcinema.com/reviews/cannes2003_2.html
It also explains the title:
« Van Sant said the title refers back to the late Alan Clarke’s 1989
35-minute BBC film about the violence of Northern Ireland, suggesting midst all the political posturing by Catholics and Protestant leaders that the violence was like the metaphorical elephant in the room no one wanted to recognize. That the title invokes the Republican party is « Something we mused on, » Van Sant told a foreign journalist. « But the origins of the project were back after Columbine happened four years ago, and I wanted to make a mainstream film (for the networks). »
From Wikipedia (with an explanation of the title again)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_(movie)
From the Sacramento Bee
« The movie was shot in 20 days. There were no scripted lines, and the
students improvised their dialogue, with Van Sant asking them to base their characters on their own lives. »
http://www.sacticket.com/24hour/entertainment/movies/news/story/892267p-6216217c.html
Trailers and clips
http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&id=1808485843&cf=trailer&intl=us
http://www.cinemovies.fr/fiche_multimedia.php?IDfilm=1975
About the real event
An article from 1999 describing the killers and their relation to the trench Coat Mafia.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/04/22/columbine/
Official reports from juvenile diversion program officers about the killers
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/columbine1.html
To find more articles and resources
About « Elephant », « Bowling for Columbine » and the real events in 1999
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/infonews/themes/violenceinschools.htm
New : a teacher’s guide on Mickaël Moore’s site
Don’t miss this new part of his site : a 60 pages guide, with a lenthy text in the middle, but lots of useful ideas for lessons and debates around « Bowling for Columbine ».
http://www.bowlingforcolumbine.com/library/teachers/pdf/complete.pdf
