February 8th

1.On Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester:
Van Sant says he was not worried about selling out and wanted to experiment with a type of filmmaking he'd always enjoyed but never done before. He liked the human dramas of the 70's was intrigued by the Good Will Hunting script. He wanted to experience what it would be like to be hired out to do a film as a "stand in director" for a studio. The Good Will Hunting success led him to want to try that sort of filmmaking again. After being constrained to studios and producers in Hollywood, he claims that doing films like Gerry and Elephant are liberating in that they are free-form and don't require a screenplay.

2. Van Sant considered traditional screenplay formatting restricting. Taking a page from Cassavetes, he filmed Elephant with little to no scripting prior to filming, leaving room for improvisation and naturalism. Adding to this, he uses long patient takes to build to a quietly explosive release when the violence begins. The long takes add a level of intensity and focus around the characters that remove you from a typical film-watching experience and into a more organic one. He creates a web of characters that meet throughout and even have a role in the repetition of scenes. Van Sant manages to avoid emotion and sentimentality in his utterly cold portrayal of such a sensitive subject.

3. The second act may have been the complicating action. This structure doesn't apply to Elephant since it is composed in a different way than Classical Hollywood filmmaking does business.

4. The long, unbroken takes give the audience a sense that the events are happening in real-time. Again, this adds to Van Sant's naturalism. The final act contains as many shots as the first two combined, meaning that the pace is much faster and ultimately builds upon itself.

5. The psychological motivations are left out of the equation and Van Sant paints a broad picture of high school as a social function and explores the way different groups interact with each other. The shooters are not given a purpose, but shown from purely objective lenses. The focus is not on the individual but on youth as a whole and all the dysfunctions that may come with it.

6. Heath gives directors credit for their work, but claims that looking at films as products of auteurs is one-dimensional in that it ignores the audiences and the social conditions in which it is made. Edward Buscombe suggests augmenting the theory with an attention to "the effects of the cinema on society... the effect of society on the cinema... the effects of films on other films." It relates to our discussions on Van Sant because it is concerned with whether or not authorship is significant in filmmaking and what effects it has on cinema and its audience.

7. Without authorship, the viewer is free to create his/her own meanings and come to conclusions purely subjectively. Meskin questions whether or not authorship really is restricting. "Limitations and exclusion of meaning are good things." He also adds that meanings vary from culture to culture.

8. One argument claims that due to the large crews that often work on Hollywood films, giving one person credit is wrong. The counterargument is that the director has creative control and therefore is the creative source behind the art. It relates to our discussions on Van Sant because of the exploration of the meanings of authorship and whether or not the collaborative nature of filmmaking nullifies that idea.

9. It questions whether film interpretation should be concerned with author's intention or the text itself. The collaborative process of filmmaking is not the same as a single author writing a novel. Van Sant's intentions in his films are an unknown, but can be inferred through repeated motifs found throughout his body of work. Whether or not his "authorship" is help up even when he makes a Classical Hollywood film like Good Will Hunting is up to debate and challenges the concept of authorship even further.