Playback / The Elephant Man
The Elephant Man · 1980
I Am Not an Animal
A man is chased through a station by a crowd, and the camera makes us one of them.
Watch for
- The handheld, jostling camera inside the crowd — we are not watching the mob, we are in it.
- The switch to Merrick's point of view as he is cornered, the frame closing in with him.
- How the camera finally holds still for him to speak, after minutes of motion.
A worked reading · COCA
CContention
Lynch uses point of view to implicate the audience in the crowd's cruelty before letting his subject answer it.
OObservation
Merrick is pursued through a railway station by a jeering crowd, shot handheld and at close quarters, until he is cornered in a lavatory and turns to cry that he is not an animal.
CConnotation
Putting the camera among the pursuers makes staring an action the audience performs rather than observes; the sudden stillness when he speaks hands the frame back to him.
AAudience
We are made complicit in the spectacle, so the line lands as an accusation aimed partly at us.
Your turn
- Whose point of view are we given during the chase? When does it change?
- How does camera movement create the feeling of panic here?
- Why does the camera stop moving at the moment it does?
For teachers
The clearest POV lesson on the shelf, and a good pairing with the Camerawork page. Distressing by design — preview before screening with junior classes.
