The Elephant Sitting Still

With the second instalment of contemplative cinema, we present to you Hu-Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still, which is a long, solemn meditation on the existential malaise that cripples the disenchanted Chinese youth.

The movie, set in a grim and derelict industrial town in northern China, explores a society that inflicts irreducible cruelty and violence on a large scale.

Though filmed in color, the inescapable greyness of the anemic sky and the foggy dimness of grimy and cramped interiors are matched only by the frozen bleakness of public spaces.

Hu, a protégé of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, adapts his teacher’s meticulously crafted long takes to his own purposes. The meandering extended takes, infused with the nervousness of a frenetic camera, convey a volatile tension that threatens to explode at any moment. In doing so, he maintains a mood of nihilistic claustrophobia that reflects the sense of economic desperation afflicting the characters.

Hu’s aesthetic sensibility is itself an act of resistance, and his untimely death haunts the story like an immutable apparition.