East of Elephant Rock East of Elephant Rock East of Elephant Rock is a 1977 British independent drama film directed by Don Boyd and starring John Hurt, Jeremy Kemp and Judi Bowker. It was Boyd's second feature film following his little-noticed 1975 "Intimate Reflections". Like William Somerset Maugham's 1927 play "The Letter" and two subsequent film adaptations, its narrative content depended on the 1911 Ethel Proudlock murder in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which became a "cause célèbre" scandalising British colonial society and which had been featured in a "Sunday Observer" article as recently as the year before. Boyd, drawing in part on his own experience
Elephant (2003 film) to the parable of the blind men and an elephant, in which several blind men try to describe an elephant, and each draws different conclusions based on which body part he touched, and Van Sant's film uses that interpretation, as the same general timeline is shown multiple times from multiple viewpoints. Later, Van Sant discovered Clarke's film referred to the phrase "elephant in the room" (the collective denial of some obvious problem). Also, Gus Van Sant named Chantal Akerman's film "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" (1975) an inspiration. Clarke's film "Elephant" reflects on sectarian violence in Northern