Gus Van Sant, Elephant, and Beethoven. Music and Sound as Key Constituents in Filmic Sensemaking

Maeder, Costantino [UCL]

Gus Van Sant’s Elephant constitutes a sort of reenactment of the Columbine School Massacre. By making use of neorealist forms and strategies, the director avoids simplistic explanations and obvious moral judgments by deconstructing and contradicting the most common, pre- dictable explanations of mass shootings. The soundscape, apparently diegetic, plays a vital role in this film. Surprisingly, two famous piano pieces by Beethoven, Für Elise and the iconic first movement of the Moonlight sonata are played in their entirety by a professional pianist. These executions are nondiegetic. Both pieces are played as well by one of the perpetrators. Beethoven’s piano pieces are foregrounded within the signifying framework of the film and oblige an attentive moviegoer to reconsider the importance of the soundscape as a protagonist of the whole film: what seems to be natural, diegetic sound, within closed spaces, appears to be musique concrete, and therefore artificial and nondiegetic. While at diegetic narrative level, this film appears to be inconclusive, as many critics and re- viewer have stated, this is not the case at enunciative level.