Gus Van Sant's Death Trilogy: Gerry, Elephant, Last Days

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Gus van Sant seems like a filmmaker without a film to me. He hasn't really seemed to know what he wants to do since MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO... His latest films in particular (of those I've seen) seem more like attempts to sustain his career and find a niche for himself than they do serious attempts to say or do anything. As Jonathan Rosenbaum said, I'd rather see him failing with GERRY than failing with FINDING FORRESTER or remaking PSYCHO, but... actually, either way I don't care much anymore. Maybe he'll find his voice again at some point -- I did like DRUGSTORE COWBOY, way back when.... but for now, colour me skeptical.

I always wondered if maybe Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was the breaking point for Van Sant. Rumours of numerous re-edits after disasterous festival screenings and scathing reviews right after such praise for My Own Private Idaho. It seemed that after the failure of Cowgirls things were never the same again for him. I have enjoyed some of his films since then but found none them even approaching the brilliance of Idaho or Drugstore Cowboy.

[pemmican]

Yeah, I've thought that too. Wonder what happened...? I've actually wondered if someday there'll be a "Gus van Sant Director's Cut" of COWGIRLS that attempts to make more sense of it, someday...

I somehow can't shake this uncanny image of Nietzsche and Chevy Chase having a conversation...

A.

[putney]

and "elephant" is very close to alan clarke's "elephant" (except clarke's is much more visceral, for me)

putney

[Argonaut69]

When people used to ask me who my favorite directors were I used to answer without hesitation Howard Hawks and Gus Van Sant. They both seemed to represent a directorial approach that valued sympathy and complicity with a films protaganists, an unsentimental humanism as well as a sort of low-key cinematographic naturalism that was pleasing to the eye without being too pretty or formal.

Van Sant's first three films (the Portland Trilogy of Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho) remain to this day three of my favorite films of all time and all works that repay multiple viewings. Despite carpings from some critical circles, I thought Good Will Hunting was simply wonderful for a mainstream, Hollywood project even if less edgy than his earlier work.

I liked Gerry, Last Days and (to a lesser extent) Elephant but haven't felt a tremendous desire to revisit any of them a second time. I can't help but feel that the fuzzy warmth of the earlier films has been tossed aside in favor of an icier, more abstract approach that isn't quite as completely satisfying to me.

That said, I'd rather see Van Sant doing what he's doing than resigning himself to some middle of the road, bland project that was put together by commitee. He's a treasure and I always await a new film from him with anticipation.

[Kirkinson]

Gus Van Sant on Last Days

Question: Is "Last Days" an outgrowth of "Gerry" and "Elephant"?

Gus Van Sant: In some ways, yes. All three films take place in limited settings. In "Gerry," the two characters are in a single area, the desert. In "Elephant," the high school is the only real setting, apart from some scenes in a house. In "Last Days," the characters are generally in one house.

The films are also similar as far as the size of the effort, with a limited cast and a limited crew. Stylistically, they are trying to get away from movie conventions, such as using multiple angles to describe scenes.

Q: Are there any themes that run through the three films?

V.S.:They're all about death. They form a trilogy, films that are inspired by stories that were in the papers. "Gerry" was inspired by news item about two guys who got lost in the desert. "Elephant" was a way to look at the wave of school shootings, like Columbine that happened in the late 1990s. "Last Days" came out of the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994.

Q: But the films are not docudramas, they go into a different aesthetic realm. Having been inspired by factual events, how did you do it as a filmmaker?

V.S.: All three films are attempts to use fiction to learn something new about those kinds of situations. All three of them are stories where people don't really know what happened, because there are missing elements. In "Gerry," there were two guys who went into the desert, but only one came back. With school shootings, there's always the reason question "why," or "how did this happen?" With Kurt Cobain, nobody knew where he was the last couple of days, and what was going on. The inspiration for "Last Days" was not so much the immediate event, but the ensuing question of what happened, which was a media event.

I was certain I had also read an interview with Van Sant around the time Elephant came out in which he mentioned working on Last Days and went into more detail about how the films fit together as a trilogy about death, but I was unable to find it. It's entirely possible I made it up.

[Lino]

I agree with almost everything you wrote David but I would like to add some more thoughts.

The more I watch Last Days, the more I feel that it's the twin brother of Elephant - at least from a formal and schematic point of view. Both play with notions of time, as I said earlier, as crisscrossing narratives challenge our perceptions of what happened from one point of view and then from another. Gerry is literally linear (the narrative has no flashbacks or flashforwards) in this respect and bears no resemblance whatsoever to this stylistic device.

Both Elephant and Last Days contain a sex scene between two apparently straight boys that feels natural and spontaneous - a clever move from van Sant that seems to be again challenging us, this time around about our own notions of sexuality. Although they come out of the blue, they do not feel strained or out of purpose.

And I also found that Elephant felt very elegiac like Last Days, no doubt helped by the Beethoven music that was being played but also for the fact that you already knew beforehand that these kids were going to die - it was a recording, a reminiscence, a reenactment of their "last days" on this earth.

Last Days felt to me like the logic conclusion of this trilogy and to me it didn't disappoint - it brought together everything that van Sant was trying to say in the 2 films before this one while at the same time hinting at what is to come (Blake's spiritual ascension might be an indication of this).

But I agree that Elephant is the centerpiece. It's a more tightly focused piece of work that somehow Last Days seem to want to emulate.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Yeah, I've thought that too. Wonder what happened...? I've actually wondered if someday there'll be a "Gus van Sant Director's Cut" of COWGIRLS that attempts to make more sense of it, someday...

Yeah, I would like to see that! But having read the book, I think that Van Sant was screwed from the start. It is a very hard book to adapt especially if you're going to for a literal interpretation as Van Sant did.

[HerrSchreck]

Dunno. Thought GERRY was just a Bela Tarr imitation with nothing new or interesting of its own about it, and only a limited success as an imitation (since it is paced and LOOKS like a Bela Tarr film, but otherwise rings pretty hollow, unlike Tarr's films). ELEPHANT was formally a bit more unique and interesting, and does a number of things well -- portraying at least some of the mood of life in a North American high school -- but it has its trite moments and I've come to agree with a friend in Australia that in fact the driving force behind the film probably wasn't a desire to say or do anything other than create an artefact -- there was no real point to making it, save to attract attention to the filmmaker and his work, by seizing on a controversial issue and pretending to deal with it -- it's moral intent is really no deeper than a piece o' crap like MISSISSIPPI BURNING, even tho' it plays to a higher-brow audience. LAST DAYS was so universally panned I skipped it. Is it more interesting/ambitious than the other two films?

Gus van Sant seems like a filmmaker without a film to me. He hasn't really seemed to know what he wants to do since MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO... His latest films in particular (of those I've seen) seem more like attempts to sustain his career and find a niche for himself than they do serious attempts to say or do anything. As Jonathan Rosenbaum said, I'd rather see him failing with GERRY than failing with FINDING FORRESTER or remaking PSYCHO, but... actually, either way I don't care much anymore. Maybe he'll find his voice again at some point -- I did like DRUGSTORE COWBOY, way back when.... but for now, colour me skeptical.

After an urge to be defensive on Van Sant's behalf, I have to get past my protective sentimentality for this director and admit this guy is probably right. The marvelous uniqueness & beauty of COWBOY and IDAHO, both of which I saw in the cinema as an electrified teenager when they came out, have been disappeared from this man's work for many years. It was so satisfying: the formal beauty of both films, the visual poetry mixed with the unabashed sympathy for junkies, homeless kids, whores, queers, hustlers.. the combination of the apparent genius and the uncompromising street-loyalties of this guy was fucking thrilling, the freshest blast of fresh air the cinema had seen for a long time in my opinion. Labeling RAGING BULL (which I love, don't get me wrong.. much was filmed in my nieghborhoods of the north Bronx & Village) the best film of the 80's (as so many critics do & did) misses the in-my-opinion deeper, and certainly more subtle beauties of DRUGSTORE COWBOY which instantly became-- and still remains-- among all-time favorite films.

These two films were classics for the ages, films that could stand alongside the very best of the best by the best directors. Getting past the mass-market hump of TO DIE FOR, GOOD WILL HUNTING (an effective mass appeal melodrama), Van Sant has not produced works anywhere near as complete as COWBOY or IDAHO.

The more I see & hear of Van Sant the man, the more I suspect that we are talking about a very quiet mind with not a hell of a lot bursting out of it... a mind capable of great ingenuity & passion but only in certain specific zones of personal concern. Listening to the commentary on DRUGTSORE, I couldn't help but wonder if this man is just Quiet, or has he become frighteningly... Blank?

The trilogy (I've seen ELEPHANT & LAST DAYS.. liked the former, didn't think the latter much worth talking about, definitely not worth revisiting) seem to me at times to be the work of a director enjoying great freedom yet at the same time a bit artistically adrift & unsure about what it is he personally Wants To Say In Life, and taking highly charged controversial material and presenting it in as radical a way as possible, almost as a means of stalling.

I don't know if I'm saying this properly, but it just feels at times to me that the guy has hit a wall & doesn't know what to do beyond illustrating his sympathies to lost kids. So he excercises his directorial freedom in a way whereby he will still be perceived as Experimental, or radical, or just plain & simple noticably different director. He started out making some of the best films of the final decades of the 20th century, hands down. These films maintained a radically fierce loyalty while at the same time exhibiting extremely deep feeling (as well as sense of cool) in extremely poetic style. Nowadays I see films maintaining the same loyalties but with an obfuscation of the director's sense of his own feelings (quite seperate from a lack of editorialization or lack of sentimentality, incidentally, both of which are majestic qualitites) as well some confusion viz as his own directorial identity. This radicalization of style feels like a time-killer to keep himself on the Important Director Docket until he can push out something truly immortal once again. EDIT: ALSO WANTED TO MENTION ELEPHANT & LAST DAYS also feel like stalling as well viz nonfictional source material (though it's true COWBOY was a semiautobio, but interpreted with far more sincere & personal results), as he is falling back on his roots as a documentary filmmaker. Can he make ass kicking mindblowers a la COWBOY & IDAHO about subjects without street life, lost kids, and homosexuality? Can he make movies as good as those two which can be considered searing masterpieces without radicalizing the style?

But I wouldn't dare write him off yet. Clearly he's still itching to make important films, so a return to timeless greatness may yet await..

[Scharphedin2]

I have not seen Mala Noche, but Schreck's description of first seeing Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho is very close to my own memory of first seeing these films. Here was a new director, who attempted to say something real about being a teenager. Yes, these people were extreme social outsiders, but beneath the skin of the junkies, hustlers and vagrants, I could see myself and my friends at the time.

I think the next many films were the typical wedding between Hollywood and the independent artist. Van Sant needed to survive to make the pictures he truly wanted to make, and Hollywood wanted to capitalize on the qualities of Van Sant without the art. As with so many directors, this worked in a couple of instances (like Good Will Hunting), in other instances it did not work (at least for those who fell in love with Van Sant's early films).

Seeing Elephant was (for me) like seeing the early films for the first time. I think some of the other posts hinted at this, but have you thought about how closely related the early trilogy of films is with Van Sant's most recent trilogy? Aside from the focus on young outsiders (and death for that matter), the theme of time that Annie talks about is extremely prevalent in both trilogies. And, just as the latter trilogy represents a unified formal approach to rendering "time" in film, the early trilogy had a similar agenda. Phoenix' attacks of narcolepsy became a vehicle to exploding time in MOP, Dillon's lapses into drug heaven served the purpose in DC... Mala Noche, I have unfortunately not seen.

So, to me, the early films' treatment of time and death and youth, felt like the depiction of someone very close to these experiences. Whereas, in the new films, and particularly Elephant, Van Sant is a little further removed from the characters, but the sense of death, loss, and time passed, is all the stronger for having been rendered by a director now halfway through life. And, so also his formal approach to time on screen has evolved, from a splintered and very immediate sensation of the "now" to a more placid and meditative sense of the inevitable forward flow of time that can be halted only, and ever so briefly, through the act of remembering.

In the end, what a completely beautiful handful of films... I saw Elephant when it was released, but I have not sat down to watch it since, yet, there are moments in that film that flash through my mind weekly... those long tracking shots that end up in slow motion (just like David mentioned above)... it is hard to explain, but this is completely how my own memories of high school play, when I let my mind wander back.

[Scharphedin2]

Hmm... Until reading elsewhere in this forum that MALA NOCHE may be a forthcoming Criterion title, I was under the impression that it had been left unfinished?

I do like Van Sant, and I look forward to seeing this film, which by your description sounds very related to MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO in terms of the plot, albeit with a positive outcome to the love affair.

The book(s) of photographs that you mention are gorgeous... I remember seeing them at the local Borders in Chicago years ago.

And a final aside to the discussion... Wasn't Van Sant involved in producing KIDS? In some respects it is like a missing link between the early "young outsiders" films and the new "death" trilogy...

[David Ehrenstein]

Gerry is much closer to Philippe Garrel than Bela Tarr. Elephant is Gus Bela Tarr movie.

Not sure if the three films are "about" death any more than Mala Noche and My Own Private Idaho -- both of which contain key characters who die in the course of the action.

[sevenarts]

i have yet to see elephant (it's next on my list), but i think both gerry and last days are fantastic movies that have been sadly underrated, maybe because a lot of viewers were expecting something like Van Sant's earlier movies. and also of course because these are very challenging and potentially offputting films. however, though they are certainly a challenge, i'd totally disagree with the contention above that these movies are cold or lacking in emotion -- it's just a different type of emotion, that sometimes seems to be hidden or distant, but is really just quiet. i think both films of this "trilogy" that i've seen so far pack a tremendous punch (a subjective matter, to be sure)... my first experience watching both was just overwhelming, and subsequent viewings haven't dimmed that impact any either. my own view of these films is that van sant is taking some very sensationalistic stories and draining them of their tabloid quality, leaving behind only a very bare and minimal humanity and the basic essence of the stories. but if you doubt the emotional content of the stories, just take a look at the two incredible music scenes in last days, or the gorgeously desolate images of the desert in gerry which portray emotion through landscape. both films are very sparse, and impart great weight to mundane actions and speech. i always get a big laugh (maybe the only one in either film) out of casey affleck's speech towards the beginning of gerry, where he starts off mumbling about fighting & building & planning, and after a bit it becomes apparent he's talking about a "civilization"-style video game. there's so much weird pathos put into that scene, but the content is so absurd -- and that basically sums up gerry for me, and for that matter maybe last days as well... finding pathos and beauty in absurdity and human failings.

anyway, it's my feeling that there's way more going on in these films than there would appear to be on the surface. there's such a surface simplicity to them, and if you watch them without engaging it'd be too easy to just be bored. but because of the films' passivity, they practically demand an engaged, patient, and actively thinking audience. i'm not sure either film's really perfect, but i think they're both tremendously exciting and interesting works.


edit: on reflection it seems i underrated the amount of humor in these films myself when i said there was one laugh between both films. i almost forgot the scene of casey affleck stranded on the rock in gerry, another great example of poignant absurdity, even somewhat plausible surrealism. and there's the jehovah's witness intrusion in last days, probably other moments i'm forgetting as well.

[HerrSchreck]

I just want to be clear here where I stand on these flicks. I'm not sure if the generic post being used as a springboard into the latest pro-trilogy posts are in answer to mine.. but I want to be sure my statement isn't being simplified for convenience.

I greatly enjoyed and admired ELEPHANT.. I haven't seen GERRY. I thought LAST DAYS was merely so-so. If there's any consensus on that film, seems to be that it is so so, whereas ELEPHANT was very good. It definitely lacks the cohesion and impact (and direction, and performance) of ELEPHANT, at least for me.

While there is some very good work here, and I still like Van Sant very much, I could sit here all nite extrapolating the pro's resident in ELEPHANT for example, but the balance of his more recent work in my opinion just simply doesn't approach the soaring masterpieces that marked IDAHO & COWBOY. And by the way I find these "Trilogy" films to be, beyond the orchestration of the actors in the long tracking shots in ELEPHANT, far far far simpler works than COWBOY & IDAHO.

And I'd be cautious of coming on a board like this and suggesting, even politely, that the reason folks don't appreciate the trilogy vs his more celebrated masterpieces is that they're not Getting the elusive subtleties of style and subtext in GERRY and LAST DAYS. These are mildly radical films because the characters are talking to and for each other and not for the audience. It is up to the audience to find intercourse with such unenhanced material, which is really not obscure. Compared to Bresson or even RUSSIAN ARK this is THE LION KING. That's basically it-- emotional nuance, grief running beneath the mundane, running beneath which is the threat of imminent catastrophe-- with some long tracking shots. I hope that didn't come off sounding nasty because it wasn't intended so, and your post indicates a real decent soul lurking there behind the sincere words. But lets try & discuss the guy without one suggesting one "gets" something the other doesn't.

[sevenarts]

And I'd be cautious of coming on a board like this and suggesting, even politely, that the reason folks don't appreciate the trilogy vs his more celebrated masterpieces is that they're not Getting the elusive subtleties of style and subtext in GERRY and LAST DAYS. These are mildly radical films because the characters are talking to and for each other and not for the audience. It is up to the audience to find intercourse with such unenhanced material, which is really not obscure. Compared to Bresson or even RUSSIAN ARK this is THE LION KING. That's basically it-- emotional nuance, grief running beneath the mundane, running beneath which is the threat of imminent catastrophe-- with some long tracking shots. I hope that didn't come off sounding nasty because it wasn't intended so, and your post indicates a real decent soul lurking there behind the sincere words. But lets try & discuss the guy without one suggesting one "gets" something the other doesn't.

i just want to say i really wasn't trying to suggest that people don't "get it" -- this is all entirely subjective stuff, and i was really just stating my own reaction to the 2 of these films that i've seen so far. i do believe there's more to the films than most people seem to see in them, but that could just as easily just be me. as i said above, and as you repeated, a large part of the impact of these films does fall on the audience. i think it's a very intentional choice on van sant's part to make these films somewhat passive and distanced, requiring the audience to make the necessary emotional leaps towards the film. and i'm not sure why you slight the film for being all about emotional nuance. i'd probably agree, although i think there's also an implied examination of media sensationalism, particularly in last days, which completely drains cobain of any trace of glamour to reveal a very raw humanity. but even if the films were only about emotional explorations, in my opinion, that's an entirely valid concern for any film, and it's hardly just limited to the lion king.

[Argonaut69]

Hmm... Until reading elsewhere in this forum that MALA NOCHE may be a forthcoming Criterion title, I was under the impression that it had been left unfinished?

This film is a real treasure and it pops up now and then at repertory theatres.

It was listed as an upcoming DVD release on the Plexifilm website for years but now it is listed as a title TBA. I finally relented and bought a cheap bootleg off eBay last year that appears to be a very poor dub from one of the limited VHS cassettes released.

Mala Noche remains one of my very favorite films from Van Sant and is especially recommended to anyone who loves Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. It shares the same virtues as those other two films.

[zedz]

Hmm... Until reading elsewhere in this forum that MALA NOCHE may be a forthcoming Criterion title, I was under the impression that it had been left unfinished?

This film is a real treasure and it pops up now and then at repretory theatres.
It was listed as an upcoming DVD release on the Plexifilm website for years but now it is listed as a title TBA. I finally relented and bought a cheap bootleg off Ebay last year that appears to be a very poor dub from one of the limited VHS cassettes released.

Mala Noche remains one of my very favorite films from Van Sant and is especially recommended to anyone who loves Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. It shares the same virtues as those other two films.

Hear hear! I still consider (as I did at the time) Idaho a mild disappointment after those first two. (That film still falls apart for me whenever Keanu and Shakespeare are in the same frame.)

After that, van Sant got extremely patchy (To Die For was a brief return to form, and I like his cover version of Psycho - in concept more than in execution) until the three latest films. It's so rare to see an 'establishment' American filmmaker swim against the mainstream.

[HerrSchreck]

and i'm not sure why you slight the film for being all about emotional nuance. .

Again, I'm not slighting the film! At least if we're talking about EL. And I was not slighting the films which I find less successful than IDAHO & COWBOY for "emotional nuance". There is a difference between "not liking as much as XYZ" and "not liking at all." What I was responding to was the suggestion that these films have an essential substance which can only be gotten to by those who are able to process something radically challenging or obscure or elusive about them which-- if I took your initial post correctly-- stems from a difficult style. My statement was that the film's emotional nuance, at least in my opinion, is not wrapped in all that difficult a style. It's not a slight at all, merely my opinion where these films stand perhaps ankle deep viz the pantheon of more notoriously 'difficult' works whose emotional frieght resides in a zone so elusive that consensus is nearly impossible. In terms of emotional accessibility, some of my favorite films-- Dreyers JOAN, Murnau's SUNRISE, hell even TOKYO STORY-- these in terms of emotional accessibility are CINDERELLA versus some of the more difficult major release works of Tarkovsky, Bresson, even Melville's later works like SAMOURAI or ARMY OF SHADOWS where people deeply into the medium of film genuinely don't understand why they should be watching these films. My statement is that among the way-too-many films I've seen in my life, the trilogy we're discussing are not all that obscure or elusive in their presentation.

i'd probably agree, although i think there's also an implied examination of media sensationalism, particularly in last days, which completely drains cobain of any trace of glamour to reveal a very raw humanity. but even if the films were only about emotional explorations, in my opinion, that's an entirely valid concern for any film, and it's hardly just limited to the lion king.

I got the opposite in it's treatment of Cobain, and this seems to be a widespread perception of the problem of LD. The only workable response is that this is NOT supposed to be a true to life portrayal of this dude who was quite intelligent and far enough along the metabolic junk highway to where he shoulldn't be acting so relentlessly spaced out. Cobain the human being came off as a very sincere-- sensitive and genuine and serious and funny, all the while on junk-- in real life. The stoner-teen portrayed in the film was straight out of Beavis & Butthead... never in my wildest dreams would I believe that while completely out of sight of the world in his own privacy that Kurt acted like such a lunar lander while on junk or straight or anywhere in between. Wobbling around in that fictional, fashionably-bleak bizarre high muttering incoherently in grunge heaven, overwhelmed by narcotics as though he was a joybanging chippy taking his very first honeymooning jolts of H. It all felt very naive to me, and those who were very very close to him I would imagine would say the same. This is my feeling on that aspect of LAST DAYS. Aside from the moment he picks up the guitar, the character bordered on being a nonstarter for me. This is why it'd be tough to motivate myself for a revisitation.

[sevenarts]

Again, I'm not slighting the film! At least if we're talking about EL. And I was not slighting the films which I find less successful than IDAHO & COWBOY for "emotional nuance". There is a difference between "not liking as much as XYZ" and "not liking at all." What I was responding to was the suggestion that these films have an essential substance which can only be gotten to by those who are able to process something radically challenging or obscure or elusive about them which-- if I took your initial post correctly-- stems from a difficult style. My statement was that the film's emotional nuance, at least in my opinion, is not wrapped in all that difficult a style. It's not a slight at all, merely my opinion where these films stand perhaps ankle deep viz the pantheon of more notoriously 'difficult' works whose emotional frieght resides in a zone so elusive that consensus is nearly impossible. In terms of emotional accessibility, some of my favorite films-- Dreyers JOAN, Murnau's SUNRISE, hell even TOKYO STORY-- these in terms of emotional accessibility are CINDERELLA versus some of the more difficult major release works of Tarkovsky, Bresson, even Melville's later works like SAMOURAI or ARMY OF SHADOWS where people deeply into the medium of film genuinely don't understand why they should be watching these films. My statement is that among the way-too-many films I've seen in my life, the trilogy we're discussing are not all that obscure or elusive in their presentation.

fair enough. i took the Disney comparison to be an insult to Van Sant's films, but i guess you didn't mean it that way. i wouldn't say that i meant the films necessarily have a "difficult style" which makes them any better than anything else. certainly, by most standards these films are stylistically challenging, though far from unprecedented or alone in that regard... there are more obtuse works, to be sure, but i don't see why that's really relevant. tarkovsky and brakhage and whoever else are probably more abstract or difficult, but, um, so what? anyway, what i meant was not really that these films are the most difficult to understand or anything like that -- that's kind of a childish standard to rate film by. i do think the particular style of these films complements what they're trying to say, and by edging towards obtuseness and stripping away layers of character, this deepens the films' messages and emotional impact (in my opinion, of course, and obviously you'd disagree).

I got the opposite in it's treatment of Cobain, and this seems to be a widespread perception of the problem of LD. The only workable response is that this is NOT supposed to be a true to life portrayal of this dude who was quite intelligent and far enough along the metabolic junk highway to where he shoulldn't be acting so relentlessly spaced out. Cobain the human being came off as a very sincere-- sensitive and genuine and serious and funny, all the while on junk-- in real life. The stoner-teen portrayed in the film was straight out of Beavis & Butthead... never in my wildest dreams would I believe that while completely out of sight of the world in his own privacy that Kurt acted like such a lunar lander while on junk or straight or anywhere in between. Wobbling around in that fictional, fashionably-bleak bizarre high muttering incoherently in grunge heaven, overwhelmed by narcotics as though he was a joybanging chippy taking his very first honeymooning jolts of H. It all felt very naive to me, and those who were very very close to him I would imagine would say the same. This is my feeling on that aspect of LAST DAYS. Aside from the moment he picks up the guitar, the character bordered on being a nonstarter for me. This is why it'd be tough to motivate myself for a revisitation.

well, i don't really disagree with anything you say there. when i said the film drains cobain of glamour, i didn't mean that it reveals the "real" cobain either. this is FAR from a realistic portrayal of cobain, and i don't think it was ever meant to be. it's not a cobain biopic by any means. i don't really know enough about drugs to know how realistic the behavior in the film is for a late-stage addict, though it certainly seems over-the-top and exaggerated at least a few notches. again, i think this was quite intentional. what van sant seems to be doing in this film is stripping away a great deal of the "real" cobain and giving us a kind of raw archetype who speaks eloquently only through his music. michael pitt doesn't give a naturalistic performance at all; it's a more extreme form of the blurring of language in Gerry, where the characters also mumble and slur all their dialogue. i think the film is clearly meant to be watched with cobain in mind, but at the same time i don't think we're meant to think this is cobain we're watching, anymore than the kids in Elephant are true-to-life to the Columbine killers. what i get out of Last Days is a meditation on stardom, the distancing of stars from fans and life in general, and the raw emotional potential of music. in a way, the main character in Last Days is a kind of generic Everyman rock star.

anyway, it sounds like we're actually pretty close in our analysis of these films, we just disagree on how much we enjoy them or get out of them.

[HerrSchreck]

i do think the particular style of these films complements what they're trying to say, and by edging towards obtuseness and stripping away layers of character, this deepens the films' messages and emotional impact (in my opinion, of course, and obviously you'd disagree).

This caught my eye though I skimmed thru this (your de-capping your sentences are killing me & turns a lot of this to mush.)

Please stop inventing objections from me! You brought up the style, not me! You keep latching onto this and pegging it on me. I never said I don't like his style, that his style is a problem, or that the style is THE problem in these films. Style never is a barrier for me, usually doesn't have anything to do with my judgement on a film unless it gets in the way of the director's intentions. It became a focal point because you suggested the style was somehow inhibiting folks from penetrating the epiphanaeous substance in them, and I merely said I don't, across the broad spectrum of filmdom, see these works as particularly forbidding or unapproachable.

I don't have a per se problem with the style in these films. My problem is that their substance is not as massive & soaring as some of his other works.

[David Ehrenstein]

i think the film is clearly meant to be watched with cobain in mind, but at the same time i don't think we're meant to think this is cobain we're watching, anymore than the kids in Elephant are true-to-life to the Columbine killers. what i get out of Last Days is a meditation on stardom, the distancing of stars from fans and life in general, and the raw emotional potential of music. in a way, the main character in Last Days is a kind of generic Everyman rock star.

Quite true, except for the "Everyman" part. While inspired by Cobain (who Gus knew slightly) the anti-hero of Last Days represents a number of druggies on the scene of Gus' acquaintance.

It should be pointed out that Gus had a band of his own "Destroy All Blondes," in the days before "Grunge" became known as such. In other words before Cobain came along in the first place.

[Don Lope de Aguirre]

Gus van Sant seems like a filmmaker without a film to me.

Sadly, I have to agree... I am not convinced Gus van Sant knows where he is going. If he did why so many changes of direction?

'Last Days' perhaps best sums him up: technically wonderful but...what's the point? The thesis, rockstar as christ/saint, is so trite and banal! And when his 'soul' rose from his body I almost gasped in shock. It's a shame bec I really wanted to like the film and some of the scenes were fantastic but I can't help feeling that all of that talent and effort was wasted on a frivolous idea. As for the guy (who if I remember correctly is soon to be married) having gay sex... so???

'Gerry', sorry but I refuse to be gulled. There's nothing there! The (gratuitous) beauty of the National Geographic photography is not going to make me change my mind on this one.

'Elephant' was/is simply wonderful. 'Drugstore Cowboy' too is very good.

I saw 'My Own Private Idaho' for the first time a couple of months ago and I was shocked as to how average it was... I know this might offend a lot of the film's fans but I really don't see how this is anything above average (ditto while I'm at it 'Do the Right Thing'). I was expecting so very much but was left underwhelmed and bemused.

I may sound harsh but that's only because I care (if he was a bad film maker I wouldn't even waste the energy writing this). I'm frustrated because I feel he has a lot of talent, I just wish/hope he's find more substantial projects...and himself.

[David Ehrenstein]

He found himself quite some time ago. That's the subject of Idaho. (The Keanu character being a self-portrait.)

And to comment on an earlier comment, Gus isn't shy at all. Just stealthy.

[Anonymous]

I really appreciate the seriousness with which Annie Mall and others have approached this film, as well as GERRY and LAST DAYS. I recently wrote on this film for a collection on punk cinema. In the spirit if sharing ideas on this film I humbly offer the following excerpt/thoughts on the film. The passage was part of a larger reading of the impact of Italian Neorealist aesthetics on certain specific works that have been branded by the media as embracing a "punk aesthetic":

Amidst the deluge of reviews, interviews, and essays following the awarding of the prestigious Palm d'or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival to US director Gus Van Sant's Elephant, two distinct narratives regarding the origin of the film's title emerged. The most frequently cited explanation locates the film's title as an homage to Alan Clarke's short film about youth violence in Northern Ireland, a docudrama also named Elephant. The title of Clarke's film, according to Van Sant, references an expression that illustrates people's willingness to ignore difficult problems rather than face the assorted and potentially unpleasant reasons behind them: ‘t [Clarke's film] was about the elephant in the living room that no one could mention' (Taubin 2004: 29). In a Film Comment interview with Amy Taubin, however, Van Sant responded to a question about the relationship between his film and the infamous 1999 massacre of thirteen people at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, with the following statement:

It [Van Sant's Elephant] has elements of Columbine. But we never really tried to get at who those people were. We sort of invented our own. There are profiles of kids who bring guns to school and kill other kids. Were they too alone? Were they secretly tortured? Were they abused? Did they play too many video games? Did they see too many violent movies? Did they torture animals? You know, what are the things that caused it to happen? And one of the reasons it's called Elephant – besides the fact that it's named after an Alan Clarke movie – is that it's hard to tell. You know, for five blind men the elephant is like a wall to one, a rope to another, a tree to another, a snake to the fourth one…it's an unanswerable question. (2004: 27-9)

That these two justifications for the title of Van Sant's film arise concurrently seems particularly appropriate, especially given the multiple narratives woven throughout the film, as well as the visual style the director and his cinematographer, Harris Savides, apply to convey them. Van Sant's Elephant is a meditation on the limits of ‘seeing' and the impossibility of ‘knowing'; inspired by ‘real life' events, it is a text concerned with revealing a moment in time from a seemingly objective distance that, paradoxically, welcomes only a plurality of ultimately circumscribed perspectives. Like Gummo and Ken Park, Elephant never escapes the formalist impulses that permeate not only Italian neorealism, but all attempts at verist filmmaking. Indeed, spectacle may be the film's very point, and it is finally the audience's role as spectator that is, both literally and figuratively, ‘in the line of fire'.

Heavily indebted to the masterful camera manipulations of Hungarian director Béla Tarr, especially his Werkmeister HarmÏŒniák (2000) and SátántangÏŒ (1994), Van Sant and Savides' compositions are meticulous and yet, at times, sporadically ‘open' or ‘loose'. In some instances, the camera seems to linger on a given environment – like a cafeteria or athletic field – as Elephant's young, nonprofessional actors drift in and out of the frame. These moments create the illusion of objectivity, as do the copious tracking shots for which the film is most frequently remembered. Lensed from several feet behind the actors, these tracking shots follow the film's characters as they wind their way through the Portland, Oregon high school's eerily anonymous and labyrinthian corridors. This perspective, as the critic Kent Jones notes, allows viewers to feel ‘not so much' like they are ‘observing the students as hovering in their midst', wandering ‘without apparent purpose or ambition' (2004: 28). As such, even though the camera follows certain protagonists (introduced via title cards) through a fraction of their daily activities, conventional systems of sympathetic alignment between audience and characters are conspicuously eschewed. Rather than allowing viewers to form emotional attachments to the protagonists, or to perceive what the characters perceive, Van Sant instead limits the audience to observing the characters as the characters observe – or remain hopelessly oblivious to – the world in which they exist.

Given this conceit, it is tempting to equate the camera's observational ‘hovering' with the kind of ‘fly-on-the-wall' objectivity commonly assigned to filmic documents that purport to take viewers ‘behind the scenes' or to follow an individual as s/he goes through a ‘typical' day; even Elephant's tagline – ‘An ordinary high school day. Only that it's not' – locates the film as gesturing towards a kind of neorealist authenticity. However, such a reading of the film's dominant mise-en-scène disregards the extent to which Van Sant deploys blatantly formalist strategies, including a myriad of mechanical distortions, to create and sustain a tone of impending menace. Van Sant's use of sound, for example, varies from the naturalistic (overlapping dialogue, voices captured ‘off-mic') to the surreal (layered voices and ambient sounds morph into vaguely animalistic howling and screeching). Such sonic occlusions and gradations create a dissonance that allows viewers to experience an outsider's paranoia and alienation. This effect is most notable when the white noise of a high school cafeteria swells to an almost predatory roar, or when individual, clearly articulated words (‘loser', for instance) emerge from the cacophony. Similarly, Van Sant strategically uses natural lighting early in the film to establish an almost documentary verisimilitude before switching, as the film progresses, to a more overtly controlled system of illumination designed to impact how audiences understand what they see. During the film's dénouement, for example, the sunlight that floods through the school's plate glass windows does not merely create shadows or cast bodies into silhouette, but transforms the backlit physiognomies into almost spectral figures and, in some cases, obliterates any recognisable form.

Elephant, then, is a film about spectacle. It is a work concerned with the power of the filmed (or photographed) image and the risks one takes when one either imposes dogmatic systems of signification upon visual signs, or mechanically embraces hyper-mediated images that have been virtually decontextualised through their repetition and incorporation into popular culture. Like Eli, the photography student who fittingly aims his camera as the killers, Eric and Alex, raise their weapons, Van Sant (like all filmmakers) is obsessed with images: capturing them, developing them, analysing them, and then redeveloping them until they convey what he wants them to express. As a result, the Nazi-themed documentary at Elephant's core – a thoughtful extension of the film-within-a-film motif – provides valuable insight into the text's preoccupation with notions of spectatorship and the power that audiences and filmmakers alike assign to cinematic images. Designed to emulate the many stock footage-laden World War II documentaries airing daily on cable television, the program Eric and Alex watch while awaiting the arrival of an automatic rifle via next-day mail describes how filmmakers can manipulate images to sway public perception and impact cultural memory. ‘From now on,' the documentary's narrator explains as footage of hand-held wartime cameras and Nazi rallies flash across the television screen, ‘the German people will know only what their leaders want them to know.' Furthermore, the program's narrator explains how Nazi culture functioned as a culture of appropriation and evacuation, transforming numerous images, culled from a plurality of cultures, into a simplistic iconography for a media culture that, like the one that exists in the US at the dawn of the new millennium, is predicated largely upon slogans and sound bytes.

This is not to suggest that the shooting spree that concludes Van Sant's film is motivated within the film's diegesis by a preoccupation with Nazi culture. Indeed, given Elephant's narrative and visual logic, such a reading is exactly the type of reductionist response to tragic events that ensures their incomprehensibility, if not their recurrence. The same teens that gun down their classmates not only lack the historical and cultural perspective necessary to recognise the image of Adolph Hitler, but are also shown as involved in a variety of other activities, including playing Beethoven on the piano, drinking milk and orange juice, and quoting Shakespeare. As Van Sant explains, the film's audience encounters a large quantity of information, including:

…a video game, a spitball thrown, a Nazi war documentary, a kiss, a Satan car freshener. Things that ask you to think about the piece of information and what it means…[The teenagers responsible for the massacre at Columbine High School] were humans and not demons. They were not outside the community – they are you and me. They are not to be demonized by any one piece of information. And if you are a person who would demonize the two kids…then you are the type of person who would probably carry a sign [outside of Columbine High School] saying “Fags did this.â€

[Jay]

Sorry. The above was me.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

An essay on Van Sant's death trilogy