Reading Response for February 8th

1. With Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting, Van Sant found himself making films that he wanted to make regardless of the fact that some people might see him as a sell-out.  Fearing that he was too dependent on underdog characters, he tried to just stand in as a director when on set.  Both films maintained marginalized characters from the "bad" side of town, meaning they were not wealthy, so Van Sant was still able to maintain two of the aspects we have discussed in reference to his contributions as a film author.  After reading his opinion of the scripts and the films experiences themselves, I now understand why Good Will Hunting did not feel like a Van Sant film, other than the aspects that we looked for in class, but I can appreciate the film more as a part of his canon after getting his opinion on it.


When it comes to the comments about Van Sant's vision in relation to the heterosexual white male directors, I felt like Taubin was kind of out of place in the way the question was posed to Van Sant.  It almost seemed as though the assumption being made was that just because Van Sant is a homosexual white male that his films automatically had to be viewed with a homosexual slant towards the actions taking place, and while I do believe that homosexuality does play a part in most of his films, I do not think that it's as big a part of his authorship as Taubin tries to make it out to be.  As we read earlier in the semester, it's just one of the many issues that Van Sant likes to bring up in his films.  Yes, he likes to put a sexual stamp on the films that he makes, but it is not always homosexual in nature.  However, I feel like Van Sant handled the assumptions in such a way as to defend himself without attacking Taubin's statements.  Instead, he simply says that it might be the audience "reading into the film."


The first time that I viewed Elephant, the kiss scene definitely caught me by surprise.  Not because it was two boys kissing, but I just didn't see it coming.  However, upon multiple viewings of the film, Van Sant's statements do make sense.  The way in which the two boys interact throughout the film show their close friendship with one another in a way that almost makes it look more intimate than just a casual friendship.  Van Sant explains his reasoning behind it as what he feels kids who spend a lot of time together do together, especially as these two characters are about to go into a life or death situation.  He used the kiss to make the boys "human," instead of trying to demonize them, which is something that I find to be very interesting.  When making a film about a school shooting, most people would try to demonize the people doing the killing, however Van Sant brings it upon himself to add a human element to most, if not all, of the characters he directs.  


Though we discussed his re-make of Psycho in great detail in class, I did find Van Sant's reasoning behind re-making the film to be very interesting.  I never really thought of making a film as an "appropriation exercise," but I appreciate his reasoning behind it.  Instead of trying to "rob" older, forgotten films of their integrity and character, he wanted to re-make something that everybody would know.  It was a challenge that had not been done before, at least not to the extent that he did it with the nearly shot-by-shot re-make, but it was really just an exercise for him as a director, and I think that's the way that people should view it instead of trying to compare the old version and the re-make to see which one is "better."  Obviously, the first film bears Hitchcock's fingerprint and he films it in a way to give it critical acclaim, but that does not mean that Van Sant's version is any less worthy of being appreciated as what it is, a director taking a film and making it into an exercise for himself.


2. Van Sant considered the traditional screenwriting format to be restricting because it did not allow for any real freedom during the film production phase.  Instead, it was merely a translation from script to screen.  Everything in the script was seemingly set in stone once the ink hit the paper, and that was how the lines would be delivered and how the scene would be set up.  With Elephant, Van Sant got rid of scripted dialogue and allowed for what he called "ordinary conversations."  Instead of his script being set in stone, the lines of the script worked as a filmmaking "map" for him to follow.  He also used non-professional actors so that the conversation would feel more "ordinary" and less scripted.  For non-professional actors, not having to memorize lines from a script would allow them to shape the characters in the film themselves, with the help of Van Sant, and it would become more about how conversations were handled than what was said.  To develop the narrative, Van Sant follows the lives of various students in the school instead of just focusing on the perspective of the shooters.  While there's a good chance that many people watching the film would know what was going to happen, we are able to connect with the other characters before the shooting occurs, and we, as an audience, barely see the shooters in relation to the other characters until the killing actually begins.  Though the actions seem to take place within a certain day and a certain time, the audience is left to figure out exactly where they are in time and space, as the film follows various characters from many different points throughout the film. 


3. The second act of Elephant is different from other films with a three-act structure because it does not follow conventional standards for a second act.  Usually, the protagonist would be faced with multiple obstacles, problems, and other things to keep him/her from his/her goal in the narrative.  Instead, the film covers what went on during the previous day and follows a different character.  Elephant does not have one clear-cut protagonist, so the second act is not able to function as it normally would, not that Van Sant would have allowed it to function that way with the way in which he styled and structured the narrative of the film.


4. While many people recognize that Elephant had no defined time frame, other than taking place during twenty-four hours spanned across two days, what most people don't realize is how Van Sant plays with shot duration to show more of the action within those twenty-four hours.  The audience is actually exposed to a lot of the action that took place between many of the characters over that twenty-four hours period instead of focusing on the actions of one character, even though John does take over a prominent role in the films.  The shot duration nearly acts as though the actions were happening in real time, and in the third act, when the shooting spree for Alex and Eric begins, the real-time feel continues and the film "nearly approximates the actual time frame of the events of the Columbine shootings, which occurred over... fifteen minutes."  Elephant's shooting sequence lasts nearly twelve minutes.


5. The big difference between Elephant and Hollywood and most independent films is that Elephant does not follow one character in particular.  While John does seem to become the film's main focus at times, the narrative still spends a great deal of time getting to know each of the characters as the camera follows them through their actions taken on the day of the school shooting.  In fact, other than the school shooters who are constantly being traumatized in their school setting, the audience barely has any information to connect to any character that would be a true "protragonist," other than John, who has to deal with his alcoholic knowledge and the fact that he saw the shooters going into the school and made no efforts to stop them.  The tracking shots used to follow the characters give the audience a long time to look at the characters, but they never really penetrate beneath the surface of the characters.  These strategies allow Van Sant to show the disconnect between the student-to-student relationship and the student-to-authority figure relationship.  None of the characters are really connecting with one another, and in a way, the audience is unable to connect to any of them as well.  In a way, it's just like every awkward phase that any high school student has ever had to go through.  Teenagers feel as though they don't belong, and Elephant depicts that in a way that feels true to the high school experience.


6. Stephen Heath's criticism of cinematic authorship states that authorship could exist but that the critical approach to a film should not just be focused on the work of the director.  Instead, there should be an approach that allows for the analysis of all of the work put into a film by various crew members that add to the sense of authorship often labeled only under the name of the director.  Only focusing on the director's creative input distracts from audience reactions and discounts any views that might merely be interpretations of the viewers and were not actually placed into the film by the director himself.  Many hands play a part in how a film is received.  Focusing on a very narrow aspect, like just the role of the director, would also take away the impact of social situations and culture have on a film.


This plays a significant role in our class because we are looking at Van Sant films from an authorship perspective, and while many of the "marks" we claim he places on a film could be accurate, there are many creative moves made by other members of his crew that we might be attributing to him when they were not his ideas.  Furthermore, the way the film is made could be entirely dependent on the crew that he is working with and their ability to execute the directorial vision that he has.  Also, Van Sant is very big on playing up societal standards and cultural roles his characters might have.  Poverty, and other social issues, are big story points for him.


7. Barthes demands "the death of the author."  Foucault also tried to predict a time when "the author function will disappear."  Neither Barthes nor Foucault see the merit in having an authorship based criticism of films, and they seem to think that the only way for it to stop polluting the field of film criticism would be for the idea of authorship in filmmaking to disappear completely.  While Meskin seems to agree, to some extent, that the idea of directors as authors of films is outdated, in a way, and somewhat romanticized, while also saying that there are not enough parallels being made between novelists and filmmakers as authors for it to stand its ground as a critical concept, he does not feel that such a radical step as "death" for the idea of authorship needs to take place.  Instead, he argues for a better definition of the author concept while also arguing that it is not even clear which stance Barthes and Foucault even have on the supposed existence of authorship.  Meskins simply finds their arguments unpersuasive.


8. Many of the arguments against solo-authorship in mainstream filmmaking deal with the fact that so many people work on a studio film set that it does not make sense for the director to be handed the label of the author of the film simply because he is the end all, be all of filmmaking decisions on that set.  The arguments for solo-authorship in mainstream filmmaking, however, go against this idea completely by comparing the process to a peer review process for an academic journal or to the editing process of a novel.  Many people give their input into how the project should come together, but it is the "artistry" of the director that allows for the project to truly come together.


This relates to Van Sant because we are looking for particular ways in which he places his thumbprint on his films.  However, with some of his more mainstream crossovers, especially with his re-make of Psycho, one has to wonder just how much of his thumbprint is visible on those projects.  His independent works notably show his filmmaking style, but does the veiled appearance of his thumbprint on more mainstream works make those films any less than a Gus Van Sant film?  That's what our course is meant to evaluate.


9. The motivations for the shift from "actual authors" to "author constructs" by some critics are that there is no denying that, while there are some real fictional authors, there are also authors that are implied within the film.  While the director may not have written the story for the film that he created, he is still an "author construct" because he is the implied author of the translation of the script to the screen.  One argument in favor of the implied author is "the suggestion that recognition of and appeal to the author construct provides the best explanation of the apparent unity and coherence that many films present us with," us being the audience and critics alike.  However, Meskin feels that this argument is flawed because it implies that the markers of one individual creator can create a sense of unity.  However, the use of "author constructs" could "distort our responses to cinema" if one author, implied or otherwise, was assigned to a film.  This explanation seems muddled, and Meskin explains that the motivations for the shift are questionable at best.  People who support "author constructs" often refer to the "frequent apparent mismatch between the character or the personality of the real person(s) who made a work and the character or personality expressed in the work."  The actual person(s) who made the film should be of no true importance, then, as their stances are not reflected in the films.