Thursday, 22 October 2009

'Elephant' Viewing Journal

Title: Elephant
Director: Gus Van Sant
Genre: Crime/drama/documentary
Audience: Teenagers
Narrative: Based on a true story about a day in the lives of a group of average teenage high school students. The film follows every character and shows their daily routines. However two of the students, (Eric and Alex) two close friends and students in a suburb of Portland, calmly plan and perform a mass execution of their classmates and school administrators in the course of a day.
Film Language: Most of the shots in the movie are very long and Steadicam-based, lots of tracking shots of the characters build suspense and allow us to know what the chracters are like. Not a lot of non-diegetic sound, its mostly gunshots, screaming, chatting etc, which is all diegetic. Part of the film was edited and shown three times, recapping what had happened but each time showing a different characters actions.

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