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)
