As a reader of arts criticism, there’s a decent chance that maybe after discovering John Keats or “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” or maybe, disquietingly, at some more recent point in your life, you’ve wondered: Would it be worth dying horrifically young if it meant you could produce even a single work of art that survives for centuries after you do? Would that be a life wasted, or a life realized?
The latter possibility has its comforts. After all, the idea that artistic genius invites a potentially lethal battery of consequences is an ancient and durable one. A falsely reassuring, Orphean myth of self-sacrifice accompanies every Christopher Marlowe or Kurt Cobain: Early death was the price for their art, and naturally, it was one worth paying, for posterity at least. Artists themselves seem to buy into this. The Notorious B.I.G.’s magnum opus is entitled “Ready to Die.” Yukio Mishima supposedly wrote the searing final page of his Sea of Fertility novels the same day he committed seppuku.
And in October 2017, a Chinese novelist and filmmaker named Hu Bo took his own life shortly after completing “An Elephant Sitting Still,” a 234-minute, cinematic monument he had written, directed, and edited. He was 29 years old.
“Elephant,” which is Hu’s sole feature film, had its U.S. theatrical release last month. The movie takes place over the course of a single day in an eastern Chinese city, an unnamed purgatory where the sky is locked into a sunless, uneasy beige. The film is shot in a series of long takes, often with key events happening just beyond the camera’s view. Oscillation between closed and wide shots evokes the claustrophobia of living within the world’s largest authoritarian machine, paired with the unknowable vastness of an individual’s inner life. One important scene takes place in a cramped tunnel. Minutes later, the dazzling panorama of a character screaming at a railroad bridge recalls American industrial landscape painters of the early 20th century.
The first hour of “Elephant” introduces a world of violence, corruption, intergenerational conflict, and petty humiliation. Wei Bu, the unloved child of a drug-addicted former police officer, accidentally maims his high school’s bully and must evade small-time gangsters on the hunt for revenge. On the other side of town, the bully’s older brother, a philosopher-criminal oddly unconvinced of the strict necessity of vengeance, watches his own best friend hurl himself off a balcony. This, notably, is not the only suicide in the movie. The child of an elderly army veteran tries to guilt his father into a nursing home, and the old man sets off on a long, moody walk around town, during which his dog is killed by a larger dog belonging to a much richer family. A teenage girl argues with her alcoholic mother and then leaves for school, where a cellphone video upends her life. The plots intensify as they merge, and several obscurely interconnected characters speak cryptically of an elephant in a town called Manzhouli, an animal that remains perfectly still no matter how much it’s prodded or mocked.
Some movies, including some truly great ones, offer a temporary escape from life. A much smaller number are life — the entire human pageant from top to bottom, an encyclopedic reckoning with every question that matters. These films, of which “Elephant” is one of the few made this century, can’t possibly capture the fullness of existence if they’re unremittingly bleak. “Andrei Rubalev,” a classic of the film-as-life genre, climaxes in a spasm of blood and destruction, but it concludes with the forging of a great church bell and one of the most ecstatic sequences in all cinema.
The sources of light are not as easy to identify in “Elephant.” There are flashes of compassion and beauty over the movie’s four hours, but they usually manifest just long enough to draw attention to their own unlikeliness and throw the ambient cruelty into sharper relief. Barriers between people in this society are too daunting, life among the Chinese urban lower-middle class too grinding and circumscribed for a redemptive exclamation point like “Rublev’s” to have been appropriate. The clouds never part, literally or figuratively. But a kind of redemption comes anyway, with stunning understatement and without overt reference to any religious system or, at least, none that most Americans are likely to recognize. It does not give away too much to say that the film affirms a core humanity that the surrounding political, social, and spiritual degradation is incapable of fully extinguishing.
Toward the film’s end, one of the characters talks about the dangers of hope. Every city will be as horrible as this one, he warns. This realization contains hope’s origins. It’s only after freedom from the delusion of getting to a better or higher plane, he explains, that one finally learns to live in reality.
In the days after watching “Elephant,” I often wondered why Hu couldn’t internalize the wisdom of his own film. It’s a question now unanswerable. The connections between art and life are never as clear-cut as we’d like them to be, even with a work as enormous as this one. Film lovers will never find out where Hu might have gone after “Elephant,” but in its vexing, defiant optimism his masterpiece is proof that the grave isn’t the only possible answer.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet magazine.
