In the northern Chinese city of Manzhouli, they say there is an elephant that simply sits and ignores the world. Manzhouli becomes an obsession for the protagonists of this film, a longed-for escape from the downward spiral in which they find themselves.
Peng Yuchang Wang Yuwen Zhang Yu Li Congxi Zhenghui Ling Xiaolong Zhang Li Danyi Kong Wei Kong Yixin Chaobei Wang Wang Xueyang Zhu-Yan Manzi Zhaoyan Guozhang Li Su Yun Huang Ximan Li Qing He Miaomiao Li Binyuan Shunzi Guo Jing Xiangrong Dong Zhang Shuai Zhou Yinglong Zhao Weimin Hao Shimin Chang Wukui Liu Xiaohui Zhu Jianliang Zhang Jinzhong Show All…
Da xiang xi di er zuo, Um Elefante Sentado Quieto, 코끼리는 그 곳에 있다, 코끼리는 그곳에 있어, Da xiang xidi erzuo, An Elephant sitting still, Siedzący słoń, 코끼리는 그 곳에 있어, Слон сидит спокойно, An elephant sitting still, Ένας Ελέφαντας Στέκεται Ακίνητος, Слонът е още там, Da Xiang Xi di er Zuo, Sedící slon, Chú Voi Ngồi Im Trên Đất, Слон сидить спокійно
Germany
Berlin International Film Festival
South Korea
Jeonju International Film Festival
USA
UK
FranceU
Hong KongIIB
GreeceΚ-15
Spain
Netherlands16
South Korea12
France
Germany
Greece
Hong Kong
Netherlands
South Korea
Spain
UK
USA
It’s tempting to think of “An Elephant Sitting Still” as a suicide note written with blood in a dirty patch of hard snow. Hard to sit through and impossible to forget, this torpid four-hour anti-drama is suffused with the sort of hopelessness that cinema only sees every once in a long while (Werner Herzog’s “Stroszek” and Béla Tarr’s “The Turin Horse” come to mind), and the man who made it — a former student of Tarr’s — killed himself before the world premiere of his monolithic first (and last) feature. His name was Hu Bo, and he was 29 years old.
Hu had reportedly been feuding with his financiers, who wanted to cut the running time in half. But to…
The loneliest piece of filmmaking I ever dared to sit through, it left me feeling like I was isolated from the rest of the world for four hours and everyone had moved on without me, the atmosphere is frighteningly contagious, fills up the room with carbon monoxide in a matter of seconds and putting the audience in a trance. The characters wander around aimlessly and the camera has no choice but to follow, that's all there is to it, wandering in open space, the world too large and too small at the same time, sad people clinging onto the fantasy of escape but has nowhere else to go, because it is the same everywhere, the sky is consistently grey, trains…
an elephant sitting still (2018): *4 hours long*
the irishman (2019): write that down! write that down!
TW//self-harm, attempted suicide
There's a group of four scars on my right leg. I've cut myself all over my body, but those four are the deepest, and those are the ones that aren't leaving.
I think it was in seventh grade I realized something was wrong. There was a feeling that everything was falling apart even though nothing was. It was always lurking in the back of my mind, but that year it lept out at me and suddenly everything was wrong. I couldn't go to school without thinking about how everyone hated me and that there just wasn't any point to all this. It suffocated me under its weight, and it felt like there was nothing I could ever…
The whisper of a siren,
The space between your mother’s fingers,
The life underneath,
The sight that you must turn away from.
The eternity of dreams,
The passion we so helplessly avoid,
The blood seeping elsewhere,
The darkness of a bright, summer day.
The madness that we conjure,
The aching of a tired heart,
The spirits which we pretend not to see,
Pretend not to hear.
Can you remember?
duration as both pain and compassion. the ease with which this sustains its misery over 4 hours is terrifying, and so is how in tune writer/director hu bo was with the material conditions and psychology of suffering. before tragically taking his own life shortly after finishing this film (his first and last) he cited this line from cormac mccarthy’s All The Pretty Horses as inspiration:
“he thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”
so, yes, the act of this film’s creation is…
"It's the same thing every day."
it's really like that.
a work that is impossible to separate from the director, not that one would want to anyway. hu bo's passing is woven into the fabric of everything you see, which makes the already unbearably tense and all to real depiction of loneliness all the more heartbreaking. hu bo, with his debut/swan song, managed to create a film that is nothing short of a landmark in modern cinematic history.
everyone in An Elephant Sitting Still is surrounded by someone at all times, yet it couldn't be made clearer that they are even more lonely with these people around than if they were the last people on earth. and it cant be…
The world is a wasteland. An Elephant Sitting Still is a major work of 2018, a treatise on the despair of living. This story of intersecting characters slowly tightens itself around four nihilistic lost souls. They talk of how anyone can waste their time on meaningless things, of how no one truly knows about existence, about how life is fundamentally about agony. There's a repeated idea that everyone is the same. All the leads blame others, thinking they are faultless and bad decisions belong to those who shaped the characters. They all accept a brutal honesty, both in universe and through the storytelling's uncompromising nature. This is a film about being useless to the world, of people who don't know what…
Watching An Elephant Sitting Still is like watching director Hu Bo tearing open his and his people's own wounds and showing them to the world in close-up. It's ugly and depressing, but you just can't move your eyes away for its almost four-hour runtime. There's not one single shot that doesn't ooze pain and nihilism, saves for the last scene, where a rare glimpse of hope comes at last.
This is a movie where technical achievements and cast members definitely excel. Hu's knacks for extremely long track shots and facial closeups brought the emotional devastation to the maximum on top of an already anxiety-inducing multi-layered story. Hu rarely used soundtracks and scores except for a couple of pivotal scenes, adding…
Clocked in at almost 4 hours, we watch four different perspectives gradually merge into one mournful viewpoint of societal collapse and subsequent alleviation in finding solace in the apocryphal tale of an elephant sitting still. Hu Bo’s novelistic contemplation feels like something we are not supposed to be seeing - it is too personal - with the display of the deterioration of the mind(s) and soul(s) here is, simply put, staggeringly cruel, as it allows the hopelessness to morph itself into a distinctive cry for help. The constant lingering, free-floating atmosphere makes for a deeply pensive mood while the Steadicam closely tracks each character from behind as they stroll, and with that, creating an absolute claustrophobic effect, slowly everything around…
"Life just won't get better. It's all about agony. That agony has begun since you were born. You think that a new place will change your fate? It's bullshit. New place, new sufferings. You understand? No one truly knows about existence"
- Dean
An Elephant Sitting Still was shot in a series of gorgeous long takes for only 3 hours each day in order to retain the sandy-ochre colour palette, portraying the grime and pollution of this Chinese life. The four hour run time sometimes tests the viewers concentration, but is never anything other than brilliant. The level of detail in the film is incredible, and when you consider this was Hu Bo's debut feature it is even more remarkable.…
