Elephant

I saw this film when it first came out and remember it so clearly. The film shows the executions in such a matter-of-fact way. No background swell of music. A loud bang or two. Shocked silence broken only by footsteps walking purposefully away from the scene. I was two streets away from the Guildford bombs when they went off in 1974. I remember I finished my pint before going to see what had happened - I guess I was young, then, but there was a feeling of acceptance amid the shock. We all knew what had happened. It was on the television constantly. As my friends and I approached the Horse and Groom the shouting was just starting. And then the sirens, but those very few minutes of silence after the bangs were the loudest of my life. This film showed what it was like.

I notice nobody actually from Northern Ireland seems to have commented on this... I grew up in Belfast through some of the worst of the troubles (and have been personally affected by the actions of both loyalist and republican terrorists) and I have to say that for me this film is pretty much it in a nutshell. The desensitising effect mentioned by some of the other comments is precisely what happens in real life; the fact that stuff blows up occasionally and every so often someone gets shot dead eventually starts to just become part of the scenery. I've lost count of the number of times I saw people walking through Belfast stop in their tracks for a second or two as a bomb was detonated nearby then just continue on their way. You learn to live with it, and that's the real horror, which I think is something Clarke portrays here with an extraordinary degree of empathy. Possibly some of it's because so many of the places in the film were so familiar to me but it really hit home in a way that no other film explicitly about Northern Ireland has ever done for me.

The height of minimalism. I can imagine watching this at the time and place it was meant to be watched and having the feeling of being punched in the face but not sure by whom.

Hard to watch, partly because the movie really strains the patience. But knowing the background, I sort of want to admire it. It's uncompromising, deliberately unlovely and has no interest in winning a popularity contest.

If one goes in with the patience required, it's a hypnotic and nauseatingly real that sends a message clear as day without the obnoxiousness of actually saying it: this isn't cool, people are dying. It's not an action movie anymore. A sort of anti-action movie. A lot of it is conceptual, sort of like a Pollack painting only a lot less self-indulgent.

Impossible to forget.

No context given. No story to narrate. No elaborate set pieces or character actors. Maybe about 2 lines of dialogue. What else is there? Only the brutal reality of a country's dirty little secret. Many films about touchy political issues are analysed through a character's interpretation of how they think or how a particular story plays out but Clarke plays it out simply: people are dying... never mind the other stuff, death is caused through our own inability to absorb other people's views. The end factor being death is all that really needs to be shown to get the point across. Clarke makes fantastic use of tracking shots, slipping left and right and around to follow a person into their death.

It's provocative and probably the best TV movie ever made. I can't imagine people sitting down at night, tuning into the BBC and wondering what they should think about this mini masterpiece.

In this picture not a word is spoken. Probably set in Northern-Ireland it consists of several unrelated scenes in which we follow, with the familiar 'HandyCam' shots of Alan Clarke one or two characters for several minutes until they approach a person ... and shoot him. I think it's the atmosphere, the long buildup before the actual kill, the complete lack of both emotion and conversation that made this movie work for me. Ten years after seeing this film I still remember several scenes. It gave me the feeling that I was watching the way the killings really happen(ed) in Ireland. I wish they would repeat it someday on television.