Expansion in Elephant

I saw Elephant a while ago, and didn’t know what to make of it.  I think I was annoyed by its ambiguity, or more precisely its refusal to offer explanations of any character behavior, which just seemed pretentious and too deliberately “arty” at the time.  However, after reading J.J. Murphy’s analysis and thinking about it more, I can appreciate Van Sant’s creative but understated treatment of subject matter that more often lends itself to sensationalism. 

Murphy contends that the temporal complexity of Elephant works to engage the audience in a simple story with an essentially predictable outcome.  I agree that it engages the viewer, but less in opposition to a predictable outcome than a lack of traditional narrative based on a clear, goal-oriented protagonist.  Murphy describes the temporality by saying, “real time becomes extended into cinematic time through the depiction of the simultaneity of events, which has been created by repeating the same event from the perspective of multiple characters.”  

The “repeated events” are small temporal overlaps—repeated sounds, reactions shots, etc—that act as transitions between character vignettes and signal their simultaneity.  In a sense, this is a rather straightforward example of expansion by insertion because there is discontinuity between each character build-up segment, and between these pieces and flashbacks to the killers the day before, each of which add syuzhet material and screen time.  However, if you think of it just in terms of the film’s depiction of the central events at the school, it doesn’t seem to fit either of Bordwell’s models for expansion.  The screen time exceeds the fabula time and the syuzhet time in a sense, since the same events are sometimes narrated multiple times… or is syuzhet duration the sum of these instances?  Where do the bits that are narrated multiple times fit into his model? 

I think Elephant provides a rather different case from the editing-based manipulations Bordwell discusses in terms of repeating action, since the repeated actions fit naturalistically into the wider narrative.  Because the film concerns itself with so many characters over such a short span of fabula time, it’s more difficult to discuss a unified story in relation to the storyworld.  It is as though a series of different stories are alternately narrated within the same story world and ultimately converge.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *