There’s a moment in Gus Van Sant’s film Gerry that I keep coming back to whenever I’m wondering at ways to tell a story on screen. It’s strange that a film I first saw in the haze of a festival in 2002 holds a spot in my mind so vividly, but Gus Van Sant films have a habit of doing things differently.
The scene is an almost three-and-a half-minute tracking shot that profiles the two main characters, both named Gerry, in tight focus as they trudge across a vast and empty desert. The camera just moves with the two of them, and all we hear is the iridescent crunch-crunch-crunch of their feet across the desert floor. While it's easy to marvel at the technical virtuosity, the wonder of the scene is that the audience also feels and partially experiences the empty, limbo-like transcendence of the walk.
As the scene unfolds, you kind of wait for something to happen, then wait some more, then start to focus on details in the frame — the way they’re almost walking in sync, then later how they aren’t. Small gestures become magnified until all we can do is let go. We’re quickly made conscious that there’s no inner monologue, no music, no dialogue — it’s just us, being there.
Hollywood convention has conditioned us to expect some kind of grand revelation in the midst of crisis, in which heroes come to understand themselves better and how to navigate through some broader personal dilemma, but none occurs here. Part of what I love about this scene is that it forces you to let go. It breaks convention, it breaks the audience, it breaks your brain, and in turn, it asks you to simply be there. To be present. It flies in the face of the old saying that film is life with all of the boring bits cut out.
I’ve always wanted to open a film with someone waiting in line on their own and have wondered at how long you might be able to have the scene play before they reached the front of the line, or were joined by a friend, or a fire broke out across the street, or… you get the idea. It gets at those in-between moments that are usually hated by dramatists but loved by filmmakers. Andy Warhol’s Sleep does something similar, so too much of Stalker and Tarkovsky in general. The banal made beautiful, beauty all around us if only we would stop and look.
In filming the tale of two young men lost in the desert for several days, Van Sant stages the pure experience of wandering in large, seemingly empty landscapes just as it is. He serves up huge, painterly spaces, and, at the same time, stretches time to a point where it feels as if it must break. The experience of the characters (and the audience) is both intense and empty, concentrated and vast.
If film is “life without the boring bits,” then Gerry is more alive than most.
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