On An Elephant Sitting Still

“A professor boards a fishing boat. He asks the fisherman if he understands poetry.

The fisherman says "No". The professor says, "Your life is reduced to half." Then he asks if the fisherman understands music. He says no again. The professor says, “Then the other half of your life is gone." The fisherman asks if the professor knows how to swim. The professor says he can't. "Then your whole life is gone." And the professor is thrown in the water.”

We hear this parable midway through the film. While this rumination on the futility of art as a solution to our material hardships sounds pragmatic and rational, it ultimately comes from a place of deep cynicism. The people who inhabit the oppressively grey wastelands of Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still know how to swim, but without music and poetry, they are merely drifting through the drudgery of their hollow existence as bodies without souls.

With a runtime of four hours, the film observes a single day in the lives of four people, each of whom are burdened by hardship: uncaring families, the looming prospect of economic collapse, the violence of others inflicted either by cruelty or indifference. All throughout there is a pervading hopelessness pressing in on all sides, a sense that this is how things have always been and always will be. If that sounds like a grim movie, it's because it is. It takes a lot out of you and offers little catharsis in return.

It opens on the main characters awakening at the break of dawn. We're told of an elephant in Manzhouli that remains perpetually still, all day. No further elaboration, but the mention of this elusive elephant hangs over the rest of the film like the weight of a divine power's eyes. Throughout the film these four will occasionally cross paths, their fates intertwined as they prepare to board the train to Manzhouli. The motionless elephant turns into an obsession for the characters. For them it signifies the possibility of a future they can inhabit, one that promises the better times they yearn for.

Cinematographer Fan Chao gives their exhaustion tangibility with his restless camerawork. It scrutinizes its subjects with long unbroken takes, closing in on their faces with an intimacy that feels invasive, unearthing the depths of frustration and despair beneath their faces. It makes you feel like you're sleepwalking through the day, tuning out the noise of the world like an unwanted radio. This sense of alienation also comes through in the film’s soundscape, often in its sparseness. There is very little music in this film, and even the brief bursts of violence sound muted. When characters speak to each other, there is a hollow flatness to their delivery, and heavy pauses between dialogue as if they exist on different wavelengths, unable to convey how they really feel. They are reaching for each other across an emotional chasm.

Watching this film, I was struck by its haunting familiarity, moved by such a devastatingly honest portrayal of suicidal ideation laid bare on the screen, residing in its characters and its form and its worldview. There are days when even the thought of being happy again makes you feel physically sick, and you just want to bleed yourself out, because the prospect of ending it all sounds like a welcome relief. Other days, most days even, it's just a matter of getting through the day, while holding on to some semblance of hope that the next day might be better. It's a slow-killing poison, it's uneventful, monotonous, and it doesn't often make for exhilarating cinema. But An Elephant Sitting Still eschews easy solutions to its characters’ problems, and it's a stronger film for it. It was also Hu Bo's first and last feature film. He committed suicide after it was completed, at the age of 29.

It's hard to separate this knowledge from the art, especially when it depicts suicide so emphatically, and although I'd rather not speculate how much of it is autobiographical, I can't stop thinking about it or Hu Bo. It's too simplistic a reading to say it's nihilistic and devoid of optimism. Fleeting moments of tenderness when the main characters cross paths disrupt the bleakness, and it's in those moments that we can glimpse an artist’s sincere belief in community and solidarity in the face of systemic despair. The smallest act of kindness, the slightest impulse of mercy we receive from others going through their own struggles feels like finding an oasis in a desert. It remains hopeful, understatedly life-affirming.

We are all going to die. Our memory endures in the things we leave behind. Our love, our mistakes, our joy, our hurt, in the art we create and the stories we tell. However small they seem to us, they are proof that we once lived, and mattered. Whether or not he intended it, An Elephant Sitting Still is this for Hu Bo. A parting gift to the world from a remarkable filmmaker gone too soon, that, in its closing image, powerfully affirms that your life is worth holding on to, and that the elephant is out there and it's waiting for you. If you search for it long enough, you can hear its distant trumpet.