fabian s. klinke

The Columbine Film That Did What Journalism Can't

notes.

The Columbine Film That Did What Journalism Can’t

Source: The Columbine Film That Did What Journalism Can’t, Projectionist, 12:43, uploaded 2025-06-18, playlist index 54.

Projectionist reads Gus Van Sant’s Elephant as a film about the part of a school shooting that explanation cannot reach. Van Sant says drama can reach something journalists want to reach, although the conditions of reporting make it difficult. The film pursues that remainder through ordinary time, mapped space, and a style that lets violence arrive without the pleasures of a thriller.

A childhood memory of Columbine

The essay begins in 1999, with Projectionist as an eight-year-old absorbed in GoldenEye. He draws the game’s guns and tapes them to his third-grade desk. His teacher, Mrs. Sandberg, tells him that guns probably should not sit on a school desk because of Columbine. He has heard the word for the first time and has no idea what it means. Soon everybody seems to be talking about it. The 24-hour news cycle is young, and the massacre gives it material that holds attention.

Projectionist describes an archival report as a sample of the period’s mainstream coverage. The report corners students in the cafeteria and library, presents witnesses through the language of an action film, and pushes cameras towards students who have just escaped. Its graphics and the visual association between the shooters’ clothes and Hollywood violence make the event look like a piece of entertainment. The source’s judgement is severe: America needed adults who could describe tragedy with compassion and objectivity.

That missing adult becomes the artist. Van Sant says drama might reach a place journalists wanted to reach. Projectionist turns the remark into a formal problem. A film about Columbine would need empathy without melodrama, realism without the coldness of a news spectacle, and violence without excitement. Its treatment of human tragedy would have to deny the audience the usual rewards of violent entertainment.

Van Sant had made Good Will Hunting a few years earlier, a feel-good drama nominated for nine Academy Awards. Projectionist uses that film to establish his ability to make an accessible, emotionally rewarding picture. Elephant received no Academy Award nominations, although Roger Ebert understood the difference its style made. Ebert describes a film in which people die violently while the deaths arrive with a flat, uninflected force. Projectionist’s question is how Van Sant produces that effect.

Follow shots and borrowed subjectivity

Elephant builds a subjective experience through an objective, observational style. Projectionist estimates that about twenty minutes of the film, roughly a quarter of its running time, consists of follow shots. The camera stays behind a character as they cross the school. The shots run for a long time without dialogue or a dramatic exchange.

The camera withholds the character’s face, which changes the viewer’s relation to the person on screen. Projectionist says the viewer does not read the character’s feelings in the usual way. The character becomes an avatar whose surroundings the viewer watches and reacts to from inside the movement. The comparison is a third-person video game with the agency removed. The viewer follows without knowing where the character is going or why. The character simply walks.

That method runs against the usual work of narrative cinema, which explains what a character wants and what causes the character to act. Elephant leaves those motives out for long stretches. The viewer enters the film through the school itself: corridors, rooms, weather, incidental encounters, and the quiet time between events. The ordinary world supplies the feeling of reality that a plot built from motives would organise too quickly.

Projectionist connects this choice to the demand for an explanation after a mass shooting. People want to know why the event happened because a cause seems to offer safety. A reason can place the perpetrators outside the ordinary world and make the event feel containable. Bowling for Columbine and many other films and books pursue that question. Elephant chooses the other route. It gives the viewer the experience of what happened and leaves the question of why unresolved.

Time, space, and social proximity

The film’s school feels real because Van Sant lets the students inhabit it before the shooting. He casts high-school students and works from an outline rather than giving professional actors a fully scripted set of motivations. The students improvise within a realistic environment and carry their actions through long, uncut shots. The result depends on the quiet intervals that plot-driven films often remove.

Most of the film takes place in the ten minutes before the shooting, although the film revisits those minutes from different perspectives. A student crosses paths with people the viewer has already followed. The same meeting returns from another position in the school. The encounter carries little story information by itself, yet repetition lets the viewer build a mental map. Continuous movement makes the students’ routes legible, and the routes show how they belong to the same place.

The crossings also reveal social connections. John knows nearly everyone without belonging to one clear group, and even the shooters know him well enough to warn him away from the school. Eli has a smaller circle that connects to his photography. Michelle appears almost entirely separated from the other students and speaks only with teachers. An overhead map lets the viewer trace their paths and interactions before the shooting. The film spends time on these mundane relations because the tragedy depends on the students sharing one ordinary world.

The spatial knowledge matters at the level of the body. Students who have walked through the same school for hundreds of hours know where things are. A conventional film cannot reproduce all of that knowledge in a short running time. Long follow shots that cross and recross the building give the viewer reference points instead. The school becomes a place with a layout, a social geography, and a set of routes that the audience has learned just before the routes become dangerous.

The failure to recognise danger

The shooting begins as an anomaly inside that normal world. The presence of guns feels so out of place that people cannot process the danger at once. Projectionist connects this failure of recognition to an interview with Lance Kirklin, who recalls convincing himself that the gunfire was paintball or a senior prank. After he is hit in the foot, knee, and chest, he still asks one of the shooters for help. The shooter places a shotgun behind his ear and fires.

The story gives the viewer a concrete version of the disbelief that Elephant builds through its form. A school is familiar enough to make danger seem impossible. When violence enters it, the mind reaches for a harmless explanation because the alternative would change the meaning of every nearby object and movement. The film makes the viewer stay inside the ordinary setting long enough to feel that delay.

Projectionist also catches himself searching for a motive. The question is difficult to resist because a cause promises an orderly account. Van Sant says the cause remained elusive to him. He names possible explanations such as the weather, madness, video games, or things thrown at a student in class, then treats each as a story imposed on an event whose exact cause cannot be known from the available material.

This leaves a storyteller with an awkward moral problem. A writer often makes an immoral character relatable by giving them a reason, which can turn understanding into a path towards forgiveness. A school shooting has no justifying reason and offers no redemptive lesson that could make the deaths cohere. The artist has to hold the perpetrators inside the human world without turning them into tragic heroes or making their violence entertaining.

Meaningless violence and the demand for reasons

The title’s claim about journalism has a narrow meaning. Projectionist does not dismiss reporting that diagnoses problems or policy that tries to prevent them. That work remains necessary. His claim concerns a different task: journalism and policy can explain a tragedy and respond to it, while Elephant makes the viewer experience the instability of being inside a meaningless tragedy.

The victims remain ordinary people because the film spends time with their routes, habits, friendships, and isolation. The perpetrators remain people inside that same world, which makes the event harder to place outside human life. Projectionist ends with the thought that suffering without a satisfying reason can happen to anyone. The film’s refusal to explain the shooting is therefore part of its moral discipline. It keeps the event open as an experience of loss instead of closing it with a cause that makes the audience feel safe.

Evidence and limits

This is a film reading, not an independent history of Columbine or a study of news coverage. Projectionist’s account of the archival report, Van Sant’s interviews, Lance Kirklin’s testimony, and Elephant’s construction comes through the video essay and the footage it cites. The captions are automatic and contain transcription errors, so exact wording belongs to the source unless the named interview is checked directly.

The estimate that follow shots make up twenty minutes or roughly 25 per cent of Elephant, the account of the film’s ten-minute temporal loop, and the reading of John, Eli, and Michelle are presented without a shot list, timecodes, or an independently supplied school map. The claim that mass shootings are increasing also appears as a conditional prompt rather than a sourced statistic. The video shows what a carefully made film can do with uncertainty. It does not establish that film always reaches truths journalism cannot, or that explanation and witness belong to separate fields.

Further reading / references

23 paragraphs1,687 words10,610 characters