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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS
2003 |
GOING
WALKIES - ELEPHANT PERAMBULATION IN
THE CINEMA OF GUS VAN SANT by Harlan Kennedy IT HAPPENED at In the afternoon of
his career Van Sant has gone for an epic
constitutional. His two latest films
ELEPHANT and GERRY are both about people going walkies,
people practising the ancient telluric art of
ambulation. The two-footed activity by which Homo Erectus defined his kinetic
difference from his forefathers can also be a mode of locomotion favoured by
movie-makers redefining, or reinventing, themselves by getting back to
terrene fundamentals. The earth, or the desert. The halls, the
walkways, the corridors. Think Wenders and Think of the climax
of so many screen action melodramas in which the necessary ritual of Tragic Reductivism manifests itself in the spectacle of two guys
deprived of guns, horses or other defensive accessories who must now stand on
their feet and fight with furled fists, earthlings planted firmly on the
earth. We also think of
upright, uptight Colonel Nicholson doing his liquid-kneed but defiant walk
away from the punishment oven in THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI; of Chaplin
timelessly walking down a road towards the converging lines of ‘The End’; or
of those characters in Hitchcock who walk into horror or incomprehension,
whether it is Janet Leigh’s boss walking in front of her car for that moment
of pivotal puzzlement or those brave but ill-advised snoops who wobblicam towards Norman’s gothic mansion in POV/reverse
POV while their safe, safe cars sit too far away for retreat and will later,
after their death, be shoved into a pond. Walkies.
Dangerous walkies. Well, Gus Van Sant knows all about PSYCHO. He ‘wrote the book,’ or more
exactly rewrote it. And perhaps his weirdball
Hitchcock homage was what helped to get him out of the For walking movies
are also a proud gesture of disencumberment and
regrouping. They say, I don’t need trains, planes or automobiles, I barely
even need sets, I just need two or three human beings willing to touch the
ground and move upon it, to happy or tragic end, of their own vim, virtue and
volition. 1. Elephant Walk ELEPHANT, we all
know, is the story of the Columbine High massacre: although names and
specifics were changed to protect the innocent. For the film is about innocence, good and bad. The
halls and corridors of a The corridors turn
corners, double back, intersect with other corridors, play
tricks with space and time. Yet – until too late – they never check the
forward-looking solipsism of the walkers. There are many forms of perpetuum mobile here. The song without end of
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is ladled over two scenes. Time rewinds to
replay chance meetings – even though the story seems still to be advancing –
as if these deja rendezvous’s are
recurring dream-stations on a single forward trajectory. And even when the
movie stops walking, to sketch in three schoolgirls who’ve formed a bulimia
club and chat happily while throwing up in the school bathroom, or to give an
at-home glimpse of the two boys we will learn are the killers, we sense the treadway still moving, off screen, and waiting for us to
rejoin it. Walking is Life,
here and in GERRY. And life doesn’t stop. Nor does life’s indifference,
whatever obstacles we strew in its path to alert, arouse or imbue it with
moral consciousness. In ELEPHANT the walking stops with the killing, yet at
the same time it doesn’t. The killers themselves take up the rhythm, they
foot on through the halls, canteens, corridors, bathrooms. Like the earlier
walkers they subsist on chance meetings as existential feeding-times, only
this time the feeding times are literally that,
consuming and fatal. The horror of
ELEPHANT is the fresco it paints of a world that hasn’t learned by growing
up. Or isn’t learning enough from the very institutions that should aid and
enable that growing-up. Walking in the film
is Van Sant’s pessimistic tool for discovering that
primitive untutored man still lives under the camouflage of
notionally-educated man. We are all prowlers, stalkers, nomads, unfocused
seekers of unfocused dreams, however much we affect the combustive
purposefulness and armoured vehicularity of a
meta-walking epoch. (Is it a coincidence that ELEPHANT begins with a man
unable to control the car in which he is driving his son to school?) ‘Education’ – to
‘lead out’ or ‘lead forth.’ But in
ELEPHANT we can never be sure whether the command to keep moving is issued by
those who would do us good, who have something improving to lead us towards, or just by blind generals of
destiny who demand we reenact forever the
wanderings – the each-for-himself wanderings – that have been humanity’s lot
ever since it first stood on two feet. 2. Gerry-meandering GERRY is about two
young guys both called Gerry who get lost on a nature trail somewhere in
Somewhere. (The film was shot in As in ELEPHANT,
walking is a reduction to motory essence, performed
by guys who – again as in ELEPHANT – belong to a modern world that has lost
the ancient art of peripheral awareness. Primitive man instinctively scoped
the landscape and sensed his bearings. Modern man trying to re-bond with
nature is an unfit thing, used only to going forward, whether his view is
framed by a car windscreen, the rectangle of a school or office corridor, or
the tunnel vision of his ambitions. But in GERRY, which
is as unreal as ELEPHANT is real (or reality-based), the hero/heroes begin to
refind that vastness of vision. Unlike
ten-a-penny movies about urban man or woman undone by the wilderness
(DELIVERANCE, THE RIVER WILD, BREAKDOWN) GERRY moves its fable to a higher
and more exalting mesa altogether. Yes, these guys are
walking into danger. But the film isn’t about the imperilments of the wild.
It’s about two guys entering a surreal dimension where they touch history,
even prehistory, and become walker-gatherers, hunter-trackers, citizens of
All-Time, before separating to track different fates as the future beckons.
Even the private slang they speak roams over centuries, cultures,
vernaculars. “I almost did succumb, but then I
turbaned up”. “I had crow’s-nested up here because you gerried
the rendezvous.” One Gerry begins a speech by a nighttime
campfire with “I conquered Crazy movie! Unless
we see it as a partner picture with ELEPHANT. Here is another ticking-clock
story about timelessness (though a contrasting one). The hours pass
semi-realistically – the desert sky lyrically modulates through blues and
blue-greys and cloudy mauves and deepening sunset coppers – but there is
nothing realistic about the landscape. Now brush-and-cactus desert, now
undulant sand-dunes, now rock canyon, now salt-flat, now valley of verdant
tumbleweed, it’s like some mixed-up time-lapse fable of geological evolution.
The two Gerries, who at the film’s metaphorical heart are clearly
the same Gerry, the grown-up finally sloughing the child as surely as the
present and future slough the past, relive a planet’s growth in 103 minutes. Walking is the
simple choreography of this theme-journey through time and change. Dazzlingly
simple, because so primal. (Walking is the one thing you don’t do in any self-respecting futureland
or fantasyland). In one almost ten-minute take – a shot as defiantly,
exultantly minimalist as any in the movies of Hungarian avant-gardist
Bela Tarr (Van Sant’s main avowed inspiration here) – the camera tracks
alongside the boys’ overlapping profiles as those outlines bob through the
landscape with only the scrunch-scrunch of the characters’ perambulating feet
for sound. GERRY is at once
more frightening and more affirmative than ELEPHANT. Its characters are
genuinely lost, in a vaster and more elemental emptiness, and death is a
payoff as certain as the murders in the companion film. But GERRY also celebrates the lost art of being lost.
Modern man lives in a signposted world where
disorientation is a vanished voluptuousness. That vanishing has taken with it
much of both the lyric and the epic. That GERRY is a lyric movie we witness
from the poetry of its skies and landscapes. That it is also an epic – with a
cast of two – becomes clear as the classical/historical/folkloric invocations
sit more and more assuredly in a story that opens up time and space like a
voyager probe. Walking away with the Great film. Two
great films. They should dwell together. They should no more be separated
than Scylla and Charybdis, Paolo and Francesca, or
the zodiacal Gemini. The 2003 It was noticed by many, that May night in southern As before, the filmmaker put one foot in front of the other with artful
and practised expertise. But walking is an activity
in which deep subtexts and smiling subtleties can be read. The slightly bowed
shoulders, the tilted-sideways carriage, the tension of the tuxedo’d arms all proved that in addition to a real
aureate frond for the trisyllabically titled Gus Van Sant was also now walking in a
different direction from the one in which he had walked before. So is cinema. COURTESY T.P.
MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING
INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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