Reading Response 5: Due February 8
Amy Taubin, “Part of the Problem”
1. Rather than answering specific questions about the interview, provide your own reactions to Van Sant’s comments on one or more of the following topics in relation to our in-class discussions/debates about Van Sant and authorship:
--His experience with Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester.
Van Sant brought up the fact that he was interested in making these movies based on having an “underdog” and working in a lower-class part of town, “Good Will Hunting had the South Boston. Finding Forrester had the Bronx.” These two components are a couple of Van Sants main two authorship contributors. Van Sant likes to have marginalized characters and set underbelly protagonists. One student commented in class last week that Good Will Hunting didn’t feel like a Van Sant movie, that maybe he was there and only partly contributing to the direction of the film. Van Sant commented in the interview of the same idea, “I tried to see if I could just stand in as a director.”
--His response to Taubin’s comments about Van Sant’s vision in relation to heterosexual white male directors. (You may also comment on the assumptions behind Taubin’s comments in the first place.)
Van Sant’s personality shined through when he answered, “I think what you say is true, because it’s unavoidable.” Most of the audience watching Van Sant films understand that he is gay and Van Sant does establish a sexual presence in every film he makes (some hetero and some homosexual roles), however I do not feel that Van Sant wants his movies to be explicitly gay themed because that is not what he is all about. Van Sant is gay but there is more to his personality and the person Gus Van Sant than just being gay and he chooses to create this same meaning, some gay themes but not explicitly, in his films as well. Van Sant relates “Otto Preminger is going to make his film his way. Billy Wilder is going to make his film,” and so too, each director will make a film according to their own related experiences and perception.
--His discussion of the kiss scene.
Van Sant tried to humanize the boys with the kiss scene for a couple of reasons, showing how emotionally close the boys had come with each other, and on a larger scale, humanizing the boys shows that they are “not outside the community- they are you and me.” Van Sant expresses his point of the boys not worrying about keeping a certain straight laced reputation since they were about to die, therefore no inhibitions about responding naturally to the closeness in their relationship. Of course Van Sant thought about cutting that part of the film, to avoid “stirring up dust,” but after careful consideration he felt that only cutting that part of the film would have been for the wrong reasons, out of fear of such certain audience reactions, such as those that would “carry a sign saying ‘Fags did this,’” which in all actuality those people have no idea why the boys created this massacre.
--His explanation of why he remade Psycho.
Van Sant commented that making Psycho was a “big art project and a money making proposition.” Already we know that the movie didn’t make nearly as much money as it did controversy. As discussed in class and based of previous articles, I feel that Van Sant created the 1998 version of Psycho to learn Hitchcock’s style as artist would try to create a close representation of a Van Gogh painting. Hitchcock without Hitchcock. Psycho is Hitchcock’s movie, but Van Sant made it his own movie as well through “small nuances.”
The following articles have been emailed to you (on Thursday, Feb. 4)
J.J. Murphy, “The Temporal Complexity of Elephant”
2. Why did Van Sant consider the traditional screenplay format restricting?
When Van Sant directed Elephant in 2003, he had already directed Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, having to follow a strict script and not allowing much for improvising as he had the great opportunity to do with Elephant. A couple reasons that Van Sant chose to improvise is the freedom that allows him to make the choices for each part on the set at that very moment. Van Sant feels this is the best part of making a movie.
Also, the freedom allowed for his nonprofessional actors to improvise their lines “thereby collapsing the divide between actor and role.” Van Sant tried to get a script written but the first writer Harmony Korine was too busy, and JT Leroy wrote a series of stories that Van Sant didn’t want to follow, although from the reading it appears that Van Sant did use some of the stories as a background for his characters in Elephant, such as Michelle, the young girl who cuts.
What alternative models for storytelling did he turn to for Elephant, and what specific techniques did he use in developing the film’s narrative and style?
Van Sant decided to go with a “complex temporal structure that weaves together the lives of the various characters, sometimes repeating the same event from another character’s perspective.” He used long takes, not as long as Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
but still long enough to capture the intense prelude to the casualties. Van Sant uses John as the “connecting link between and among the various characters in what can be viewed as a structural ‘web-of-life plot.’” He interweaves the characters’ lives to create a complexity of each victim and keep the audience attention to a predetermined historical event “of the infamous shooting at Columbine High School.” He uses repetition of events surrounding the victims perspective, and mostly John although he wasn’t killed, to obtain a glimpse of their lives prior to Alex and Eric’s slayings, and at the same time keeping a close accuracy of the congruity of time creating a simultaneous story relationship leading up to the massacre. As mentioned already, Van Sant also gave the non-professional actors and almost free range to make up their own lines. Visual storytelling, “choosing the minimize the amount spoken dialogue.”
3. Given that the film seems to have three acts, how is the second act of Elephant different than most conventional Hollywood screenplays?
The second act, if Hollywood had taken over, would normally have followed through with Alex and Eric’s massacre and possibly more blood and dramatic babbling of the victims (sorry, not trying to be heartless but if this was strictly fiction the victims are always babbling nonsense and bottomless promises to get out being killed). Also just to add my own personal comment, I can only appreciate the fact that Van Sant did not hype up Alex and Eric’s killing spree, so that other young minded individuals wouldn’t think a school massacre is a “cool” thing to do or a way to deal with their rotten life. Back to the question, Van Sant “extends the initial setup by providing exposition about Alex before continuing with the vignettes of the other characters.” Van Sant takes us deeper in the rabbit hole of Alex and Eric’s lives and gives the audience several story pieces that may or may not explain why these two boys decided to kill their fellow classmates and teacher. Van Sant adds another layer to the story by moving back in time to the interweaving of the character’s lives before the killing starts, with an important link of the three separate perspectives of John, Eli, and Michelle in the school hallway.
4. What does Murphy suggest is “one of the startling and largely unrecognized aspects of Elephant’s time frame”?
That these long takes “closely approximates real time…present(ing) large chunks of the action.” Murphy compares these long takes to an almost “Warholian sense of duration.”
What observation does Murphy make about the use of time in the third act?
“Once Alex and Eric begin their carnage, the film nearly approximates the actual time frame of the events of the Columbine shootings, which occurred over the course of fifteen minutes.”
5. In terms of character development, how is Elephant similar or different than Hollywood and most independent films?
Hollywood attempts to “provide psychological motivators”, however Van Sant chose to create interest for the audience by keeping their knowledge of the characters on the surface. Van Sant did not give a straight forward answer as to who Alex and Eric were, what they believed in or exactly why they decided to kill.
What specific strategies does Van Sant use in relation to revealing character?
“His formal strategy of employing extended tracking shots allows us to scrutinize the faces of the characters without being able to penetrate the surface.” This gives the audience a chance to relate the Van Sant’s interpretation of adolescence at it’s best, learning disassociation in high school.
How do these strategies relate to the themes associated with high school experience?
Van Sant comments, “The thing you’re actually watching all the time is a dislocation and nonconnection. It’s visible, it’s in the representation...the connections aren’t there between the students or between the students and the authority figures.”
Aaron Meskin, “Authorship”
Skepticism about (cinematic) authorship
6. In your own words, what is Stephen Heath’s criticism of the idea of cinematic authorship?
That cinematic authorship does exist but he doesn’t feel like films should be based on more than the director in regards to everyone else that helps create. Heath feels that if only authorship is focused on when reviewing a film, that this notion takes away from the ideology (reflect, express, instill) of viewer’s reactions to the film, the film industry, and “social conditions in which the films are produced.”
What have been some of the responses to Heath?
While Heath is not clearly stating that the author concept is a good or bad practice to follow, Edward Buscombe suggests adding to auteur theory an attention to “the effects of the cinema on society...the effect of society on the cinema…the effects of films on other films.”
How might this debate relate to our own discussions about Van Sant?
In our class discussions and previous readings, I feel that authorship is very important, including Van Sant’s personal approach to his films, marginalized characters, Portland, the road, and sexual content. He adds his own style even though in many of his movies he borrows storylines from other movies or plays.
7. In you own words, why do Barthes and Foucault suggest that we would be better off if authorship disappeared or came to an end, and what is Meskin’s response? (Keep in mind, of course, that all we have here is Meskin’s summary of Barthes and Foucault.)
Barthes and Foucault suggest that it would be “revolutionary” to end authorship based on “one limits, excludes, and chooses.” They feel that using authorship put limits on the film, in the way it is scene and critically broken down for mentally processing. Meskin’s response is advising that even though he believes authorship exists, you can’t just merely base the film on authorship alone due to other creative factors and people involved.
Two issues in film authorship
8. What are the arguments for and against the concept of solo-authorship in mainstream commercial filmmaking? How does this debate relate to our discussions of Van Sant?
9. What are the motivations for the shift from “actual authors” to “author constructs” by some critics and theorists? What objection to authorship criticism is the shift meant to address? What are the arguments for and against the concept of “author constructs”? How does this debate relate to our discussions of Van Sant? Specifically, relate this to claims (by me or by anyone in the class) about Van Sant’s choices (and how/why we know he made those choices).
__________________________
-Major Actors, screenwriters and producers play just as an important role and the movie can be well known for these other individuals, not just the director.
-Films are typically created by a group effort and literary texts are individually produced. Film is different from literature, therefore film having no “author.”
- The whole idea of auteurism was created to advance the popularity of certain directors, the film movement itself, and only for fine arts.
- Too many directors are put into this “notion of authorship”
