“An Elephant Sitting Still” A solitary 234 minutes that shows the “voiceless scream”

“Voiceless scream” and “voice of hope”

As you look at the depictions in the film, you can gradually understand why the director was particular about making it long. For example, when a man involuntarily jumps from a high rise after witnessing the truth about his wife's affair, the film never clearly shows the man's corpse on the ground. The camera fails to capture the moment when the delinquent gets into a scuffle with the boy and falls down the stairs. Of course, this is largely due to technical constraints, but what is more important is that the film does not simply depict important events, but instead focuses on the main characters who witness them. That means it matches.

The scene in which the boy, who has nowhere to go, violently protests after being given a fake long-distance bus ticket, stops as the thugs take him to a secluded place is very memorable. Both the boy on the screen and the audience watching know that something terrible is about to happen. The intensification of this "bad feeling" is largely due to the accumulation of tragic scenes up until now. “Nothing good will happen anyway.”

“An Elephant Sitting Still” (c) Ms. CHU Yanhua and Mr. HU Yongzhen

In order to depict people whose expectations are always betrayed, the camera always faces them and focuses on them. And it shows how the heart is ``screaming without a voice.'' In order to let the audience hear that voice, the production of this work carefully depicts the process leading up to tragedy, allowing the audience to walk along the path to despair. That's probably why this film needed such a long running time. In the final scene, the audience hears a "certain voice" that expresses the opposite meaning to the screams of despair.

The purity and immaturity that emerges in the last scene