1. I thought that what Van Sant said about heterosexual white male directors was interesting. As a gay director, he is the underdog, which is a recurring theme in his films. I think his reasoning for keeping the kissing scene was good, because he took into consideration the reactions it would receive, and he did not take it out specifically for that reason, because he didn't want to take it out for the wrong reasons. I think it's cool that he thinks of it primarily as a high school movie, about disconnections between people, rather than just a school shooting film.
I also enjoyed reading his opinion of Psycho. He thought it was completely different from Hitchcock's, which is interesting since it was a shot for shot, and explained that he treated the actors as humans and Hitchcock used them as "archetypes". He also mentioned throughout the interview how audiences read into his films at times, which we touched on in class, so maybe meanings are constructed that he did not originally intend.
2. He said that when you're writing a screenplay there's not "a lot of room for the fun stuff", and you are following the strict parameters of what is in the script, so for Elephant, he did not write a script, he just had a storyline, characters, and had the actors improvise on the set. This was relying on "ordinary conversations, not scripted conversations". This allowed him to concentrate more on the visual style, and his story line turned into a map of the high school.
3. It is different because it moves back in time to show crucial events for later in the story. The temporal structure is very complex.
4. The unrecognized aspect of Elephant's time frame is that right before the shooting, the timeframe "closely approximates real time". He observes that the long, continuous tracking shots emphasize a long duration of the events. The third act has a lot of shorter cuts, twice the amount of shots in each of the other acts, which make the events of the third act feel more intense and chaotic.
5. It is different because not many character traits are given. He reveals little, with tracking shots we are able to view the character, but not dig down and know what they are thinking or how they are feeling. These strategies relate to the high school experience because Van Sant is saying that the teenagers are in disconnect, just how high school creates disconnections between the teenagers, and there is a disconnect between the students and the authority figures.
Aaron Meskin, “Authorship”Skepticism about (cinematic) authorship
6. Stephen Heath's criticism of authorship is that you must also take into consideration the context in which a film is made, so the reception of the viewers and the context of the time all come into play on how a film must be analyzed, not just base it on what the director put into the text. Edward Buscombe agrees that one must look at the context in which a film is made to analyze it. This will contextualize our discussions of Van Sant, and plays into our discussion on Psycho, and how his was different because it did not have the shock factor that the original Psycho had because it was made in the 60s, before everyone knew that she was stabbed in the shower.
7. Barthes and Foucault think we'd be better off without authorship because it limits art, and without it there would be more freedom, art would exist in a "free state". Meskin disagrees, he thinks that the extent that authorship controls a work is overstated, and that too much freedom would be negative, and would take away from the work as a whole. Too much information can be destructive or distracting.
8. One argument is that the director makes the decision of what elements to use, and by choosing what goes into a film he is controlling the essence of the film, even if it is in the mainstream film system. Arguments against solo authorship in commercial filmmaking are that the director does not have as much control as he or she is believed to, and that the control a director has may not be seen as authorship, and you must evaluate the meaning of authorship. This debate relates to our discussions on Van Sant because a few of his films are considered more mainstream, such as Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, and also has mainstream producers.
9. The shift is meant to distinguish from the "empirical author" and the author as effected by the text. The shift is meant to address the idea that a film is made by a group but has the stamp of one "author". An argument for this concept is that the author construct gives an explanation for the coherence we sense in a collaborative film. Arguments against it are that a group can organize itself to produce a unified product, it is not necessarily the doing of one individual person. Also, we cannot assume what a person produces reflects on that person. This debate relates to Van Sant in many ways. He is gay, is that why some of his films incorporate homosexual themes? He is from Portland, is that why his films are mostly set in Portland? How much does Van Sant's life have to do with his films? What about Elephant, does it reflect him, too? I don't think so, so to what extent does he, as an individual, come across in his films?
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