Elephant-in-a-Box

The Village Voice's Dennis Lim discusses the Alan Clarke Collection, a box set DVD from Blue Underground which includes four of the British director's roughest, late-career films. The one you'll get it for is Elephant, Clarke's 1989 story of senseless killings in Northern Ireland, which gave Gus Van Sant the title, "not to mention the formal and emotional strategy" for his own Cannes-winning Columbine-inspired film.

Lim:

Set in a grim, emptied-out Belfast of cavernous warehouses and expansive parking lots, Elephant stages, minus context and clarification, one killing after another. Almost wordless and purposefully numbing, the film alternates between queasy motion (someone walks, walks, walks, and the Steadicam follows) and sickening stillness (someone is shot, and the camera likewise stops dead in its tracks). Clarke's masterpiece, Elephant is detached and diagrammatic to the point of abstractionóit pares a cycle of senseless violence down to cruel, anonymous geometry.