Je suis un éléphant, madame

This comedy drama is a fascinating reflection of its time - its changing values and attitudes, how society reacted to it, how different individuals managed to adapt. The genre description "comedy drama" is not entirely accurate, but it's the closest I could think of. There is no drama/comedy plot in the usual sense. We follow a class of students in their last year at school (6th form is the nearest UK equivalent), their lessons, their protests, their private life. There are a few occasions when the film drifts from realism beyond wackiness into surrealism, and surprisingly Margot Trooger is one of the director's favourite vehicles for that.

The end product lacks some coherence, but it is full of strong and telling moments. The way Dr Nemitz elegantly rebuffs a classroom revolt, the English teacher discovered as a lightweight, Rowedder parking his jeep (complete with communist flag) directly in front of a no-stopping sign - these are just a few of many memorable scenes.

I think of the film with considerable personal fondness: it was filmed at (and in) Altes Gymnasium Bremen, the very school I went to three years after this film was made. The style of the lessons portrayed in the film so accurately reflected the particular (and admittedly somewhat peculiar) style prevalent at this school that Zadek either must have watched real classes at the AG beforehand or used teachers and students from this school as advisors, if not both. There is evidence for the latter: I can assert that the dispute which students are allowed to go to the baker's shop (and when) was still going on for years to come.

In the center of the plot of the film, Pupil Rull a lively and vivid character is revealed with a top angle shot in a room full of newspapers to a Velvet Underground's 'Waiting For The Man" from their debut album. After the cast and crew credits in the opening, the red color continues as Rull is drenched and so his room, there are other characters that are introduced in the school. Against the background of the school and , Rull feels that he is entangled in the traps of the teachers who are Nazis which leads to an ideological confrontation with everyone. Things gets weirder, funny as he prepares to lead a protest against the authoritarian school system, Rull immerses in a situation where everything is not so simple, there is no black or white, but red as he draws closer to achieve what he started. There is a scene when he stands his ground, comes to a certain point sporting a red Indian attire. He behaves strangely as his collision with the system completely enters into a strange zone towards the end. There is shift in tone of the film as it takes a documentary approach as the passerby's in the vicinity react to the Swastika graffiti. Then another tonal shift to color which exposes a certain type of behavior, pointing to the problems not only of totalitarian but of the youth, class war, ideological revolt with a political purpose. Far right or left, well it is left to the viewer to make their own verdict. Who is brainwashed, who owns the mind control tool? The innocent students who found themselves under this crossfire from the struggle of opposites. Things aren't very clear but this is from fueled with the spirit of 60s, that doesn't mean this yet counter culture film made under the hippie influence, yes this is an experiment of the 60s with the intersection between agitprop film, a bit of godard, provocative, absurd and as purely artistic part, it is shot well. The humor will not land for many, it is German and the protest might looked staged artificial and without tension. On the whole, an interesting experiment, against the backdrop of student revolt, with an offbeat staging that shows the pressing problems of society. I really can't recommend it to everyone as it doesn't cater to the traditional style, political thriller nor the quasi-documentary type.

It's near the end of the 13th, the last school year for a class at a classical language high school. Next autumn, nearly all of these nineteen-year-olds will be students at an university. Youths rebelling, feeling smart and acting stupid - that's normal. But it's 1968 and the new social trends coming from the USA have hit West Germany especially hard. Pupils and teachers are out of their depth. That's the story of this movie. It's made by the theater director Peter Zadek, and it shows. Many scenes look extremely contrived. Sometimes people act like robots, the boring ones. The most frequently used shot, a front view of the class, looks very fake. Zadek wanted to cram the pupils together as close as he could. The two girls in the front row both have to sit on the right side of the table, because the left side is off-camera. It's too much in-your-face to be ignored. It's badly staged.

In the beginning, this school looks like a military academy. The teachers speak in a military commanding tone. The pupils rise, when a teacher enters the classroom. Later on they talk back, smoke in class and demand pupil participation. With rebelling so close to the final exams, they have of course already answered the question, if they would use this power responsibly. Their teachers worry more about them trashing their future options than the pupils themselves. This is not the time to shout progressive slogans like "Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh!" during a civics lession about the industrial revolution. They are shown doing more stupid things: reckless behavior on a small moped, having really awkward sex on a chair (with the guy later on yelling about it from a rooftop), playing "20 cops and 1 Indian", seven of them half nakedly climbing about in a tree.

What's the message of "Elefant"? Should youths like this, who really haven't figured out yet where to go, have a say in pointing out the direction? This movie makes it quite clear that this would be a terrible idea. None of the pupils comes even close to the grown-up, responsible and likable behavior of their teacher Dr. Nemitz (Heinz Baumann). But it's 1968, therefore the opposite is required to be true. So Zadek denies everything he told, and drops back to: The whole school system is fascist, it has to go. In the bigger picture the kids just have to be in the right.

Zadek ends his movie with playing "We", a hilarious anti-hippie-rebellion song, with lyrics like "Who also has long hair, only it's washed? We!" and "For there must be someone who not only destroys, who learns, who educates, who does his work to build tomorrow's world." It's funny, because it feels kind of true, especially today, with the schools and universities still in a progressive downward spiral. It sounds again like Dr. Nemitz' voice of reason. And in fact, Freddy Quinn, the singer, was another well-meaning adult, with an unconventional biography and a rebellious youth. This adventurous minded Austrian joined an actual circus, when he was 16 years old. Nonetheless, Zadek uses images from the Third Reich to illustrate Quinn's song. It looks as if he really didn't know, what he was doing.

"Elefant" is much too stylised to be a valuable contemporary document, because hardly anything appears to be genuine. It is too rigid to be entertaining, too confused to be interesting or to make a serious statement. In the end, it's time again to let Macbeth do his bit: "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Zadek loved Shakespeare. ("Bad German Movies"-Review No. 25)