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…

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…

"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.…

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…

Originally posted on my blog.

Hu Bo's film explains its enigmatic title straight away. The characters in this film, set in modern day China, have heard of a Circus, in a different city, where there is an elephant that sits still. The elephant could be thrashed or beaten (the film tells us) but it just sits still. On one level, and there are many levels at play here, it is a metaphor for persistence - a reflection of the cold world of hurts and harms that we have to bear, and that the characters bear in this film.

On a much more important level, this elephant that sits still is a metaphor for depression. It is a large and unignorable…

An Elephant Sitting Still 

Very bleak and slow burning film. The intercutting with three different perspectives along with the mysterious subject matter, makes the viewer want to sit through the film and figure out what’s to come next. 

Natural light is used in a majority of the shots, close ups on each lead with action in the background makes the viewer work to figure out what’s going on in the background while seeing the emotional geography of the character in the foreground. 

The long shots, with the characters sitting in the aftermath is haunting. The stillness and silence between two people when we know there is tension brewing between them activates a primal fear. It’s almost like the anticipation for…

Un elefante sentado y quieto es una película que se define entre el que habla y el que calla, pero sobretodo, en las expresiones del que calla. Aunque muchas veces el que parece estar hablando es el paisaje representado de forma laberíntica. 

Cuando la burbuja de problemas explota, orilla a los personajes a huir, esta desesperanza no es algo repentino, sino algo que ha estado presente desde el primer cuadro, donde un hombre se retrata infeliz después de un encuentro amoroso. Frente a las decisiones que enfrentan, lo laberíntico solo permite la acción inmediata, mantiene y refuerza el nihilismo. 

Aunque pueda parecer dramático y exagerado, la película de Hu Bo no se puede concebir con una menor duración; son los…