Gus Van Sant's Elephant

Even though she was at her house, she still hurried to get to school for the feeling of satisfaction and safety instead of staying at her house which is filled with fear and discomfort. Barry uses the main character’s actions to convey that the narrator only feels comfort when she is at school and that she always urges to be there. Secondly, in the passage that follows, Lynda Barry writes the narrator’s thoughts to show that just the sighting of someone’s safe haven can relieve panic. “ All I knew was a feeling of panic, like the panic that strikes kids when they realize they are lost. That feeling eased the moment I turned the corner and saw the dark outline of my school at the top of the hill” (Barry 1). The quotes conveys that just when the protagonist sees the outline of her school the feeling of discomfort simply disappears. The narrator’s mind finally went calm, as shown through the thoughts that went through her head. Thirdly, in the next excerpt, the author uses first person narrative to express the thinking of the central figure of narrative. “It’s only thinking about it now, 28 years later, that

Description: August is Marlena’s husband and the head animal trainer. He is alternately charming and brutal, both to the humans and animals aboard the Benzini Brothers train. Later in the book, it is explained that he is a paranoid schizophrenic.

At the same time, the narrator is also the victim of the Imperialism System itself. Under the system, it seems that the British manipulate the Burmese, but in reality, it is the opposite situation. The Burmese had the control over the British, especially people like the author who worked in a country under colonization. Orwell

The film is set in the year 1959 in a Vermont boarding school named Welton Academy. This academy is a very strict all boys school that demands the most out of every student so that they are completely ready for university. The term that this takes place in welcomes a new English teacher, Mr. John Keating who attended Welton himself, and follows the transfer student Todd Anderson whose brother was one of Welton’s finest students. Todd’s roommate is Neil Perry, who comes from a middle-class family that made multiple sacrifices to put him into Welton. Neil’s father is extremely strict with his son and dictates his schooling and extracurricular activities. Friends of Neil, and later Todd, include Charlie Dalton the rambunctious one, Knox Overstreet the romantic, the very smart ones Steven Meeks and Richard Cameron, and Gerald Pitts. The movie follows the seven friends through the school term starting with how strict and very stressful the courses and teachers are then showing the drastic difference of Mr. Keating. The movie remains on the lives of the boys, mainly focusing on Keating’s class and how he wishes for his students to become free thinkers which leads to many different issues with the friends.

Everything in the frame is in focus, which in a cinema viewing is a lot to take in, especially considering the films aspect ratio of 1.85:1. However, the audiences’ eyes are cleverly guided around the frame by almost unnaturally loud sounds, some of which are accentuated in post-production by Tati. The sounds against the floors create a reverbing echo, highlighting the absurd impracticality of the building. A man and a woman sit in the bottom left hand corner of the frame in what appears to be a waiting area. They are dressed identically in their monotonous grey colours, as if they are enslaved to the colours surrounding them. During the shot’s beginning, the audience is drawn to the nuns and their rhythmic footsteps as they enter the frame. Then, through a combination of actor gestures and dialogue, this gaze shifts to the two characters anchored in the foreground of the image. The rattling of a table being wheeled out by a man in white into the frame moves our eyes, as well as the couples own attention, to

In “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell retold an occasion where he was struggling to come to a final decision of whether to shoot the elephant or not. With his final decision, the elephant finally lay dying in front of thousands of people. He said that he was forced to shoot it because the Burmese people were expecting him to do that. In addition, he also explained that he had to do it “to avoid looking like a fool” in front of the crowd (14). At first glance, one would think that it makes sense for him to kill the elephant to save his face, but that was not the case. He effectively uses this incident to demonstrate the “real nature of imperialism” (3), whereas the elephant represents the British Empire.

Human beings have full control over their identities after they have received knowledge and have become shaped from external stimuli. These stimuli include the teaching process of humans which comes through tradition, schooling, and the actions of other humans and the influence of the organisms around them. Andrew Solomon, through “Son,” was able to use his experience of growing up and labeling himself as a gay dyslexic to show how his environment and knowledge had shaped his identity and how it was viewed by others with different identities. In “An Elephant Crackup,” Charles Siebert was able to explain how the other organisms or humans are able to form new identities for elephants over time by shaping them a new environment and having the elephants process it. In “Mind’s Eye,” Oliver Sacks had different case studies of blindness from different people and was able to show how each one experienced their blindness help shape and express their individual identities. The stimuli that becomes processed by a person in the situations, accounts, and studies of these works assist in the role of explaining the formulation of an identity.

Objectivism creates the exemplification of the differences and similarities between the society of the city and the high school creates a restricting environment but in different senses. The book and movie instill a sense of rebellion where they break the rules.¨We shall go down. It is forbidden!¨

The director uses the technique of flashback to show the students’ family background and the environment they grew up in. In the scene which covers Marcus’

George Orwell, author of, "Shooting an Elephant" reveals his inner conflicts to the audience by offering in depth description, using intensity, and symbolism through the act of shooting the elephant. His narration helps him do so by giving descriptive scenarios in the story. Orwell's narration can also be used to examine the role of India and Great Britain at the story's time in history. The narration then allows Orwell to use symbolism in place of description. Orwell uses narration to help explain his inner conflicts and to what is happening in each setting of the story.

When each of the students came into detention, they each had their own identities and their own underlying issues that no one knew about. When they started to open up and grow closer with each other, their identities changed all together. They were beginning to show their real personalities within each other and at the end of the film they all embraced who they really were on the inside and who everyone else was.

If you’re not paying attention, the mind can be a tricky labyrinth. The less you know about it, the more inexplicable and frightening it becomes. For example, why do seemingly benign elephants wreak havoc upon villages? In “An Elephant Crackup,” Charles Siebert explores the aberrant nature of these elephants and correlates them to their traumatizing upbringing, deprived of community and kinship. The biochemistry of the human mind, analyzed in “Love2.0” by Barbara Frederickson, serves as a worthy addendum to Siebert’s conjecture. “Love2.0” explains that the brain, hormones, and nerves work in unison to build emotional fortitude, stimulate oneself, and express positivity resonance. Siebert’s ideas of elephant culture and trans-species psyche can put Frederickson’s theory of emotions into practice. The absence of certain hormones within elephants, provided their fragmented community, can explain their volatile outbreaks. Alternatively, the reinstitution of human parental roles into elephant culture can help reconstruct their broken emotional states of elephants and rebuild their resilience; this healing process can also extend to humans.

Elephant has long been known as one of man’s best friends, who have peacefully coexisted along with humanity for thousands of years. However, the relationship between the two is no longer in the equilibrium state. In “An Elephant Crackup?”, Charles Siebert discusses the downfall of the elephants. He gives a depiction of the recent raging and violent acts of the elephants among themselves and toward other species, including humans, and presents an educated and almost unexpected explanation to their behaviors. He says elephants are just like us; they have feelings and now are “suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma”(Siebert 354). The similarity that should be something fascinating is now slowly turning them into the immensely savage beasts before wiping them out of existence. Even when the appearance of the words “stress” and “trauma” looks like a serious case of “anthropocentric conjecture”, it provides a totally new vision, a fresh way of looking at the boiling issue of the disappearance and sadistic acts of elephants specifically and wild animals at large. With the help of two powerful essays: “Great to Watch” by Maggie Nelson and “The Power of Context” of Malcolm Gladwell, the issue of the unusual behaviors of the elephants is thoroughly illuminated and its solution no longer seems to be out of human’s reach.

Communism was very unpopular during the 1900’s in Europe and the people did not have much say in it. At Polands height during the 1950’s with Stalin and Mussolini influence and the Soviet push to become communism it wasn’t a popular vote after seeing countries like Russia and Italy suffering and economy crashing. Shortly after this is when Slawomir Mrozek came out with “the Elephant” in 1962. This short story is about a greedy zoo owner who doesn’t want to spend money to get an elephant for the zoo so they are forced to create a fake one which doesn’t fool the people that come to visit for long. He uses symbols and an allegory to convey a common theme that lies can only be truth for so long, like how communist leaders keep things from the people

The cinematography of this film features numerous close-ups of its adolescent protagonists as well as point-of-view shots acquired predominantly from their perspective, thus making the viewers position themselves firmly on the boys’ side of