Youth culture in global cinema

pachyderm’s progress 213
sequence, specifically, the Adagio Sostenuto from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata
Op. 27 No. 2, ‘‘Moonlight,’’ recorded with low amplitude so that it is heard,
mixed with the voices of the kids on the playing field or the normal corridor
sounds in the school, as a distant subtext of the seen moments. Since this
particular piece of music has a continuing, even unearthly, motility, like the
movement of clouds scudding across the sky (that we see at the opening and
closing of the film in extended shots), it tends to position the happenings we
watch in terms of an all-abiding and overarching Nature or Cosmos, a Universe
of happenings all of which may be taken to be involving and fateful.
There is a feeling of emptiness, weight, unfolding probability, intensified by
the smoothness with which the story proceeds.
The effect of the lighting and music, as well as of the respectfully distant
camera position, is to detach the students from their engagements with one
another and with the place, to turn them into moving parts that are energized
and interrelated within the context of a surrounding mechanical system.
No matter what the kids are doing, their activity and relationships are
less important by far than their separation from the place, from one another,
and from the meaning of their actions.The sense we have most powerfully, in
this telling sequence but also throughout the film, is of what Patrice Blouin
calls ‘‘incredible lightness’’ (13)—too much space, space in which the eye cannot
focus, space through which one glides along as though borne by a systemic
conveyor belt. ‘‘Losing the device of cutting,’’ Van Sant had learned
from Miklós Janscó, ‘‘starts to make it less display-oriented and more of an
account’’ (Thomson, 64).
Other sequences are arranged in the same disconnected, even hallucinatory,
way. Elias (Elias McConnell), a photographer, wandering through a park
and shooting snaps of a boy and girl, then encountering John (John Robinson)
for a brief moment of conversation and a photographic opportunity; Michelle
being told by her gym teacher that she must wear shorts in the future; John
catching a ride to school with his inebriated father (Timothy Bottoms), receiving
a reprimand for being late, passing through the office where Nathan
and Carrie are getting exit permits, running into Elias in the hallway and
posing for him while Michelle slinks by. All these intersecting lines of interaction
lead us to suspect we are watching a single substantial reality from
a number of points of view, as though moving around a sanctified object or
space. Death will enter this setting, taking many of these young people. In
all of this the dialogue is curtailed, or arcane, or abashed, or absent, so that
one has the feeling these students know one another only from seeing and
passing one another day after day, and do not really use language to understand
their world or their friends in a way that transcends the superficial.