Filmmker's Analysis - Darren Aronofsky

FILMMAKER’S ANALYSIS – DARREN ARONOFSKY FILMS - REQUIM FOR A DREAM; BLACK SWAN DARREN ARONOFSKY BIO –
Darren Aronofsky (born February 12, 1969) is an American filmmaker, and environmentalist. He has received acclaim, and generated controversy for his often surreal, disturbing films.
Aronofsky attended Harvard University, where he studied film and social anthropology, and the American Film Institutewhere he studied directing. He won several film awards after completing his senior thesis film, Supermarket Sweep, which went on to become a National Student Academy Award finalist. Aronofsky's feature debut, the surrealist psychological thrillerPi, was shot in November 1997. The low-budget, $60,000 production, starring Sean Gullette, was sold to Artisan Entertainment for $1 million, and grossed over $3 million; Aronofsky won the Directing Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and an Independent Spirit Award for best first screenplay.
Aronofsky's followup, the psychological drama Requiem for a Dream, was based on the novel of the same name by Hubert Selby, Jr. The film garnered strong reviews and received an Academy Award nomination for Ellen Burstyn's performance. After writing the World War II horror film Below, Aronofsky began production on his third film, the romantic fantasy sci-fi drama The Fountain. The film received mixed reviews and performed poorly at the box-office, but has since garnered a cult following.[2]
His fourth film, the sports drama The Wrestler, was released to critical acclaim and both of the film's stars, Mickey Rourkeand Marisa Tomei, received Academy Award nominations. In 2010 Aronofsky was an executive producer on The Fighterand his fifth feature film, the psychological horror film Black Swan, received further critical acclaim andmany accolades, being nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director and winning Best Actress for Natalie Portman's performance in the film. Aronofsky received nominations for Best Director at the Golden Globes, and a Directors Guild of America Award nomination.
Aronofsky's sixth film, the biblically inspired epic Noah, was released in theaters on March 28, 2014. Noah grossed over $43.7 million during its opening box office weekend, becoming Aronofsky's highest opening weekend and his first film to open at No.1. The film was an international hit, eventually grossing over $362,000,000 worldwide.
REQUIM FOR A DREAM
Requiem for a Dream is a 2000 American psychological drama film directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Hubert Selby, Jr., with whom Aronofsky wrote the screenplay.
The film depicts four different forms of drug addiction, which lead to the characters’ imprisonment in a world of delusion and reckless desperation that is subsequently overtaken by reality, thus leaving them as hollow shells of their former selves.
Requiem for a Dream was screened out of competition at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival[5] and received positive reviews from critics upon its U.S. release. Burstyn was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance.
PLOT –
During the summer in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, widow Sara Goldfarb spends her time watching electrifying infomercials. Meanwhile, her scoundrel son Harry occasionally pawns her cherished television to fund the recreational drug use of his best friend Tyrone and his loving girlfriend Marion.
After Sara receives a call that she has won a spot on a television game show, she becomes excited about attending it in her fancy red dress she used to wear with her husband. However, she is very disappointed to learn that she no longer fits into it. After failing a strict diet, an unscrupulous physician prescribes her a regimen of weight-loss amphetamines. She begins losing weight, while becoming manic.
Harry and Tyrone dream of becoming big drug dealers, having all the drugs and money they need, and at first their small-time dealing business thrives. Harry and Marion are deeply in love, and Harry tells her that he will soon have enough to launch the clothing design business she desires. Sara and her friends wait expectantly every day for the game show invitation to arrive. Harry stops by to give his doting mother an impressive television, but when he implores her to get off the amphetamines, she confesses that the only thing she has to live for anymore is the dream of looking glamorous on a television stage, and the extra attention she receives now from her friends.
As Sara’s tolerance for the amphetamines increases, she craves the high she once had, while becoming frantic about the invitation. When she increases her dosage she develops amphetamine psychosis. When Tyrone is arrested, Harry has to use most of their earned money to post bail. The local supply of heroin becomes restricted, and they are unable find any for either use or sale. Eventually, Tyrone hears of a large shipment coming, but the price is doubled and the minimum high. Harry, desperate, suggests Marion ask her psychiatrist for money in exchange for affection; she does so at great cost to her romance. When the drug buy goes bad, Harry returns empty-handed to Marion, who is desperate for heroin, and they argue dreadfully. He departs after giving her the number of a pimp who trades heroin for sex. Harry and Tyrone decide that to put their business back on track, they will drive to Florida to buy directly from the wholesaler there.
After a series of horrifying hallucinations, Sara flees her apartment for the office of the casting agency in Manhattan, to confirm when she will be on TV. She is taken away by ambulance and committed to a psychiatric ward where she is subjected to degrading treatments. When none work, the physician induces a barely lucid Sara to approve electroconvulsive therapy.
Driving to Miami, Harry and Tyrone visit a hospital because of Harry's increasingly infected needle injection sites. The doctor notices the symptoms of drug abuse, and Harry and Tyrone are arrested. Back in New York, Marion has sex with the pimp to get heroin. Recognizing her addiction, he entices her with a bigger score of heroin if she returns that weekend for a party.
In the climax, Tyrone does hard labor in jail while being taunted by guards and suffers fromdrug withdrawal; Harry’s infected arm is amputated; Sara undergoes violent electroshock therapy; and Marion is humiliated as the subject of sexual acts at the pimp’s sex party.
When Sara's friends come to the hospital to visit, they are distraught by her almost vegetative state. Harry wakes crestfallen after the amputation, knowing that Marion will not be visiting him. Tyrone suffers in the prison workhouse. Marion lies on her sofa comforted by the heroin she injected, clutching the large bag she earned. That night, Sara dreams she wins the grand prize on a show hosted by her favorite TV host, with Harry as the guest of honor.
STYLE –
As in his previous film, π, Aronofsky uses montages of extremely short shots throughout the film (sometimes termed a hip hop montage). While an average 100-minute film has 600 to 700 cuts, Requiem features more than 2,000. Split-screen is used extensively, along with extremely tight closeups. Long tracking shots (including those shot with an apparatus strapping a camera to an actor, called the Snorricam) and time-lapse photography are also prominent stylistic devices.
To portray the shift from the objective, community-based narrative to the subjective, isolated state of the characters' perspectives, Aronofsky alternates between extreme closeups and extreme distance from the action and intercuts reality with a character's fantasy. Aronofsky aims to subjectivize emotion, and the effect of his stylistic choices is personalization rather than alienation.[10] The camera serves as a vehicle for exploring the characters’ states of mind, hallucinations, visual distortions, and corrupted sense of time.
The film's distancing itself from empathy is structurally advanced by the use of intertitles (Summer, Fall, Winter), marking the temporal progress of addiction.[10] The average scene length shortens as the film progresses (beginning around 90 seconds to two minutes) until the movie's climactic scenes, which are cut together very rapidly (many changes per second) and are accompanied by a score which increases in intensity accordingly. After the climax, there is a short period of serenity, during which idyllic dreams of what may have been are juxtaposed with portraits of the four shattered lives.
ARONOFSKY on the theme of the film ‘Requiem for a Dream’ -:
“Requiem for a Dream is not about heroin or about drugs... The Harry-Tyrone-Marion story is a very traditional heroin story. But putting it side by side with the Sara story, we suddenly say, 'Oh, my God, what is a drug?' The idea that the same inner monologue goes through a person's head when they're trying to quit drugs, as with cigarettes, as when they're trying to not eat food so they can lose 20 pounds, was really fascinating to me. I thought it was an idea that we hadn't seen on film and I wanted to bring it up on the screen.”
TRANSCRIPT
ONE
Mr. Aronofsky, do you enjoy torturing your audience?
Well, people have different levels of what torture means. Some people actually really enjoy it, so it is a fine line. I just try to get as far as I can. I think it is probably that I am still trying to annoy
my sister to get attention from her.
Your films are often polarizing as a result. Is that intentional?
I’d rather not, to be honest. (Laughs) I’d love everyone to love it and dig it, but it’s what I do. I don’t know how else to do it. Look at Requiem for a Dream people were telling me I raped them, people threw up, there was an ambulance in Toronto when we screened it at the Toronto Film Festival because a guy had heart palpitations. It’s just not that intense now, but then it was a little different. Pi was trashed, too. The New York Times called it “grainy, gritty, blotchy” and the music was “jarring.” You know, what are you going to do? You can’t win them all.
In today’s world it is very hard to create images and ideas
that people remember more than right in the moment so you want to create an experience that
lasts. That usually has to be a pretty intense journey.
But nowadays things are different. Your last couple of films have been really well received.
I think The Wrestler was completely unexpected for the people. Everyone said, “Why are you doing a movie about wrestling with Mickey Rourke? What are you doing? Do you really want to destroy your career?” And then Black Swan went pretty well. I think tastes have changed. You know when we made Requiem for a Dream it made 3 million dollars theatrically and I think in today’s world they probably would have figured out another way to sell it. You know, it was before Boys Don't Cry and these other movies suddenly became Oscar films. So maybe the taste of what people expect in the theaters has changed a bit. Soon I’ll be too old to make anything hip, so I'm catching up last second.
Could you imagine writing and directing a comedy?
A bunch of my student films were comedies, so I would love to. But I don’t know... for some reason I keep making these dark movies, I don’t know why.
Intuition?
Yeah, it is quite often that there is something about a story that I connect to and that makes me want to continue that heavy lifting. You know, each of my projects is kind of a marathon run. A lot of them won't make it to the finish line and the only reason they make it is because I go back and nurture them and try to figure everything out.
That must have been the case with The Fountain. You kept going even after you lost Brad Pitt, your main actor, during production.
He pulled out after eighteen million dollars were spent and the film fell apart. I spent the next six, seven months trying to figure out what to do. One night I couldn’t sleep, I woke up, I was sitting in my office and across from me were all these books that I had read to do research on The Fountain. And I realized that it was in my blood and there is no way I was going to be able to move on until I finished it even though there were eighteen million dollars against it.
I don’t know how you managed that...
That was pretty upsetting and the seven months following were a pretty dark time for me. But I felt really bad for the all the crews and staff because there were like four or five hundred people that were affected by it and it all just collapsed. People had moved cities...
Why did Brad Pitt step out?
It’s a very hard thing to talk about because we worked together for two and a half years so it was like a relationship. He even said that when we broke up he felt like he was breaking up with a girlfriend or something because for two and a half years we worked on it. But it’s never one thing that breaks up a relationship. Really, it was probably because I was in Australia for six months prepping the film and he was in L.A. and creatively we just grew apart.
Is intuition also important for you when you’re on set?
When you are on set and you are actually working intuition is there all the time – it's got to be. There is some type of myth about filmmakers who know exactly what they want. That may exist for some people but that is not how I work.
How do you work?
I try to get as many good people and as much good materials on set as possible and sort of create an environment that allows the actors to try things and that mistakes can happen and that I can follow my intuition and get to the right place. I think if you try to force something you can squeeze the life out of it and make something that, no matter what you do, isn't real.
It’s probably quite easy for you to get a great team around you though...
Not really... I wish I could be more manipulative, but I am not. Instead, I am very honest with actors. I tell them, “This is what it is going to take to do. It is this type of pain, this type of work. You really have to do it.” After that, most of them say, “Ah, I think I am not going to do it.” I’ve lost a lot of A-list actors over the years because of that. People's lives get very complicated and they have many opportunities. I mean look at the actors I have worked with: How many of them are in super high demand? If I get them, then it is a chance for them to do something else. But usually I don't get them.
TWO
Interview conducted by Ruby Rich from Inview.Kqed.Org concerning Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem For A Dream" and "Pi".
B. Ruby Rich (Ruby): I think you really put people into the space of, well, of somebody with a migraine headache. You know, how do you get there? Do you get migraines?
Darren Aronofsky (DA): No, a friend of mine who was a really talented actress, her career was basically devastated by her migraines, and I never realized they were so debilitating and I started talking to her and she, I started seeing artwork that came from, that migraine sufferers drew of their migraine attacks and it was exactly the type of things we were talking about, like the hand of god reaching down and pulling out a chunk of brain.
DA: What I really like about subjective filmmaking, and "Pi", and why I was attracted to this is when you're walking down the street, you're not just walking down the street. You're thinking about the conversation you had with your mom two hours ago or you're thinking about the vacation you're going to go on in two weeks with your friends. Your mind is all over the place and I love -- the great thing about filmmaking is that as filmmakers, we can show where a person's mind goes, as opposed to theater, which is more to sit back and watch it.
Ruby: You know, a lot of filmmakers seem to be either very literary-based or else very movie-based who just watch movies. You seem to really be developing this new visual style that suits each story. You know, how did you find this third road?
DA: It's probably because I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.
Ruby: So it didn't just come from growing up on Coney island?
DA: If anything, it came from eight hours of TV a day. I was a TV junkie as a kid. I am the Sesame Street generation. 1969, I was born the year Sesame Street was launched and that was the year my mom plopped me in front of the TV and said, don't cry anymore. And I think 17, 18 years later, after eight hours of TV a day, I think that's the culture I come from.
Ruby: I know that you studied animation early on and I was really struck with how the character's inner thoughts and feelings really changed their physical surroundings in a very material way.
DA: You know, it's subjective filmmaking. It's coming out of subjectivity, but definitely animation was a big influence. I mean, my business partner right now and also my college roommate, Dan Shreker who got me into filmmaking, is an amazing animator and they have to live life 24 times as long as we do because, you know, they basically have to -- every 24 frames of a second. They're basically painting or drawing and being meticulous.
Ruby: You've pioneered a lot of ingenious special effects, some of them low-budget, different kinds of camera work, way beyond a steady cam. What's a vibra cam? What's a snorry cam?
DA: Those are just, you know, marketing teams trying to add a little, you know, terms to our stuff. But vibra cam was a camera, you know, it was just a technique, a film technique we started in "Pi," which is whenever Max Coen had his headaches, the frame would shake. And how we did it back then, we just literally put the camera on a long lens and just shook it, because that was about what we could afford. And in "Requiem" we got to sort of master it. Snorry cam is basically a rig that attaches the camera to the actor's body. I call it the utmost in subjective filmmaking because the character is frozen in the sense of the frame while the background is moving.
Ruby: You rely a lot on special effects in your films. And yet I think what saves the films from being a sort of MTV razzle dazzle experience are these moments of quiet intensity, of emotional connection between the characters.
DA: Well, whenever there's not intensity, emotional intensity, I just light up the fireworks. You know, because I think that's what it's about. I think the biggest crime is to bore an audience. Really, I can't stand being bored. If anyone sleeps in my film, I'll kill ya because I just don't -- I just want to get people their money's worth.
Ruby: To what extent do you anticipate audience's reactions from the material?
DA: It's hard to really know where an audience is at. You just -- you know, it's one of those gut things; when you're watching it happen, you're hoping it's working. And then, if it's not working, you hope you can save it in editing.
And if you can't save it in editing, you hope that Ellen Burstyn is in the scene, and it will be okay, because whenever Ellen's on the screen, it works.
Ruby: Ellen Burstyn is brilliant in this film.
DA: Thank you, well, actually I shouldn't be thanking you because I had nothing to do with it. It was purely was Ellen. Here's a 67-year-old actress that lets the camera one millimeter from her face.
I've dealt with 19-year-old actors, male actors, like, well, -- she was wearing makeup, no makeup and sometimes makeup that made her worse -- you know, look worse. And, you know, just complete no vanity, complete surrender to the world, complete surrender to the
material. And that's what it's about.
You know, I think it's a modern horror film. We always saw this as a monster movie except
that the monster was invisible. The creature was invisible. It was addiction, living in the character's head and the only other difference is that the creature wins.
BLACK SWAN
Black Swan is a 2010 American psychological thriller-horror film[4][5] directed by Darren Aronofsky, written by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin, and starring Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis and Winona Ryder. The plot revolves around a production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake ballet by a prestigious New York Citycompany. The production requires a ballerina to play the innocent and fragile White Swan, for which the committed dancer Nina (Portman) is a perfect fit, as well as the dark and sensual Black Swan, which are qualities better embodied by the new arrival Lily (Kunis). Nina is overwhelmed by a feeling of immense pressure when she finds herself competing for the part, causing her to lose her tenuous grip on reality and descend into a living nightmare.
Usually described as a psychological thriller, Black Swan can be also interpreted as a metaphor for achieving artistic perfection, with all the psychological and physical challenges one might encounter, i.e. "the film can be perceived as a poetic metaphor for the birth of an artist, that is, as a visual representation of Nina’s psychic odyssey toward achieving artistic perfection and of the price to be paid for it."[6]
Aronofsky conceived the premise by connecting his viewings of a production of Swan Lake with an unrealized screenplay about understudies and the notion of being haunted by a double, similar to the folklore surrounding doppelgängers. Aronofsky cites Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Double as another inspiration for the film. The director also considered Black Swan a companion piece to his 2008 film The Wrestler, with both films involving demanding performances for different kinds of art. He and Portman first discussed the project in 2000, and after a brief attachment to Universal Studios, Black Swan was produced in New York City in 2009 by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Portman and Kunis trained in ballet for several months prior to filming, and notable figures from the ballet world helped with film production to shape the ballet presentation.
The film premiered as the opening film for the67th Venice International Film Festivalon September 1, 2010. It had a limited release in the United States starting December 3, 2010 and opened in wide release on December 17. Black Swanreceived critical praise upon its release, particularly for Portman's performance and Aronofsky's direction, and was a surprise box office success, grossing $329 million worldwide. The film received five Academy Award nominations and Portman won Best Actress for the film, as well as many other Best Actress awards in several guilds and festivals. In addition, Aronofsky was nominated for Best Director and the film was nominated for Best Picture. It is the fifth horror filmto be nominated in the Best Picture category, following The Exorcist in 1973, Jaws in 1975, The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, and The Sixth Sense in 1999.
FILM STYLE AND THEME
As she makes her way through the backstage behind the curtain at State University of New York at Purchase, one can tell all is not right with Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman). The camera trails in front her, sycophantically, as she is replete with hypnotic beauty in black and white, still standing out from the grey walls and dark surroundings. Her body quivers powerfully and almost orgasmically. The only thing the audience needs to see is Nina’s eyes to see nothing is right, even as her arms transform, and the camera steps forwards briefly to gaze upon the face that is covered in makeup to reveal that Nina has mutated into something else entirely. But is it real?
Who is really seeing this? The cinematography in Darren Aronofsky’s
Black Swan
plays a crucial
role in understanding the film’s depiction of psychosis. Nina is one of Aronofsky’s least sane characters, but utilizing various camera tricks and a kind of meta-reflexivity, there is a subtle insanity that works behind each shot to confuse the audience as much as Nina is, while
the
Swan
vérité
style with which it is shot allows the film’s foundation to be primarily subjective. Few
films play up schlocky horror against dramatic portrayals of mental illness so well, and
is one of them.
Movement is critical within the world of Black Swan. Created as a complementary companion piece to Aronofsky’s previous film The Wrestler, movement lends itself to understanding what goes on in Nina’s mind. Nina is a woman who constantly struggles for perfection and is almost never still. Even when she is still, something else must be moving around her. Her daily grind includes obsessive practicing in her mother’s Upper West End apartment (in these practicing scenes, the camera is tilted even five or ten degrees, never offering perfection), walking to the subway, and then to the stage. The camera, therefore, always moves with her. It trails behind her, like the psychosis she feels sitting at the back of her mind, stalking her every move and understanding of the world. On the subway, she stands still, but the camera shakes and judders uncontrollably, a hint at irony and a knowing allusion to her uncontrollable insanity. Even when she sits, silently fending off an older man making lewd gestures at her, the camera is never static. Its nods to the Dardenne Brothers Le Promesse are telling with its off the cuff intimacy.
The irony here is telling. The camera almost has a mind of its own whenever and wherever it goes, and the vérité style with which the film is shot is reminiscent of documentaries such as Gimme Shelter (Maysles, 1970) and Hoop Dreams(James, 1994). Cinema vérité is cinema of truth, which intentionally goes against the ideas of the film. In Black Swan, nothing is true. Though Nina seeks perfection in everything she does, it is not true. It is a performance. That shaking, though, connects to a lack of control, completely the opposite of the world that Nina inhabits. Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), the director of the production of Swan Lake Nina is starring in, shouts viciously at her, “Control it!” at the same time as the camera spins with a mix of meticulous authority and, finally, a loss of that discipline. We see this rehearsal scene through the eyes of Nina, the point of view shot literally spinning around. Therefore, we also see her stumble, her drive for perfection consuming her.
What the style of filmmaking does allow, however, is for there to be a ground within reality. As aforementioned, cinema vérité has been primarily used for documentaries, especially those that observe things. With that in mind, the style of movement of the camera and its lack of real restriction in terms of movement serve to make the world and the people ofBlack Swan nightmarishly real. Aronofsky’s film is an amalgamation of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet, Dostoyevsky’s short story “The Double”, and Satoshi Kon’s anime thriller Perfect Blue. Thus, to try to reel in the audience into a different kind of reality is an ironic juxtaposition of three overtly fictitious works (their level of notoriety varying) and ones that do not bother to hide their artificiality.
There is another irony within Black Swan with regard to the camera’s movement; although one would assume that a film with ballet would have sequences of shots that, in essence, floated with the dancers, there is not. This is, by no means, Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes nor any other musical of similar transcendent quality. Although thematically inspired by that film, Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique seem to intentionally forfend that idea of fantasy. Aronofsky wants to make the film seem as real as possible, because, to Nina, it is all real. She cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy. That is how much her desire to be perfect has destroyed her. The closest thing that we get in terms of elegant cinematography are bookends: the dream that begins the film and the nightmare that ends it.
The film begins with the dream of perfection, as it were. The camera seemingly dancing with Nina and her delicate feet as she performs as the White Swan in the dream. But this smooth camerawork does not last for long, as that shot, which lasts 28 seconds, is replaced by the kineticism that fills the rest of the film. Not even in her dreams is Nina capable of maintaining mental control.
In the penultimate sequence, Nina is ready for the audience and ready to give it her last shot, but, on stage as Nina spins with deftness, the camera does not follow her. Instead, it stays distanced, and the audience sees her perfection. Here, although the film remains subjective to Nina’s point of view, it seems to be manipulated by Nina. She does not, unlike the rest of the film, need the camera to be behind her, nor does her crazed mentality need to sit on the edge. What Nina needs and wants is an audience, and that is what the camera gives to her, staying to stage left and
Black
drifting to the center and in front as the audience. The shot lasts for 25 seconds, enough to encompass that one sequence. This change of two angles is how Nina sees herself and what she has longed for: perfection
The film is rightfully plagued with doubles and mirrors. There is a great sense of paranoia that we feel because it is as if we are Nina herself. Before Nina even properly meets Lily, she sees her through the subway but initially sees it as herself. The very possibility of competition, especially
from someone who looks like her, throws her off.
The importance of doubles within the film is not limited to paranoia but is crucial to understanding the play that they are performing. As is explained within the film by Thomas, one actress plays both roles, the White Swan and the Black Swan. The White Swan is pure, virginal, innocent, while the Black Swan is deceptive, sensual, and carnal. Nina, having claimed the role of the Swan Queen, must be both. The film is, in essence, a chronicle of her struggle to do so, to channel and manifest those ideas and mature as a woman. The doubles, though, are conjured in a
depraved way, driving Nina insane.
The difference in the actresses’ faces is important to note. Natalie Portman’s face, while retaining the typical strong cheekbones of any attractive, working actress, are soft and angelic. She has a mildly rounded face, the overall effect suggesting a childlike quality that is on the edge of
maturation (a quality which came in handy for her first role in Luc Besson’s
). In comparison, Mila Kunis has much harsher features, ones that conjure the
concepts of sexuality and deviousness to mind. She, unlike Portman, does not suggest any kind of innocence. Her cheekbones are more sculpted and more defined and her eyes slant ever slightly upwards (further defined by some of the eyeliner she employs in the film). Portman is a kitten while Kunis is the prowling cat. The camera makes sure to gaze upon these visages throughout the film to establish the similarities and differences. Using that knowledge given to the audience, the faces converge in the film, sometimes looking more like one actress than the other. The point is that they complement one another, and Aronofsky’s camera makes sure that the audience understands that the doppelganger concept within the film is more from Nina’s imagination than from reality. It is her psychosis which is causing her to blend these faces into something sinister
and antagonistic.
Leon: The
Professional
The film’s vérité style does not only ground it in a sense of reality, but also gives it a sense of perspective, important in a film where one is essentially trapped inside the mind of a crazed person. Jumping off of the loose “crazy lady” genre tropes which were set by Roman Polanski with Repulsion (a film which begins with an intense close up of Catherine Deneuve’s eye), Aronofsky establishes psychotic claustrophobia by entering her dreams and then constantly showing her point of view. This sense of point of view is not as overt as featuring every sequence from the point of view from Nina. The technique is slightly more subtle. The audience still understands that the film is from Nina’s perspective, as only she is having these hallucinations. The mirror scenes are most indicative of this style, but two other sequences in particular disinter these ideas.
Lily convinces Nina to go out to dinner with her as an apology, and it leads to Nina willingly drinking her MDMA (presumably) spiked vodka cranberry. Once Nina begins “rolling”, Lily, Nina, and two boys from the bar go clubbing in a sequence that is as hypnotic as it is terrifying. The Chemical Brothers’ delirious “Don’t Think” blares in the club as red and green lights flash on and off in a strobing effect as we see Nina dancing. The red represents passion and desire while the green represents envy. In nearly every frame of this sequence, there is something manipulated within the frame, such as an object or image that recalls themes within the film. A moon, the dark sorcerer from Swan Lake, and Nina as the Black Swan permeate the sequence. Momentarily, the electronic dance music lets up, replaced by Clint Mansell’s atmospheric and tense nightmare lullaby (which is Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” played in reverse at a slower tempo), and Nina looks around. For one frame, Lily’s face is superimposed onto Nina’s face, just prior to Lily joining in and dancing with Nina. Soon after, the music begins again. The inclusion of a tonal interlude in the sequence, one that further establishes the nightmare, is indicative of the subjectivity of the film. Onlysheexperiences this moment, even while other people are lost in the din of debauchery, and only she half-realizes the nightmare she is enduring, what with the plethora of
doubles within the sequence itself. Her obsession with Lily continues to corrode what little sanity she has left.
In the following sequence, Nina brings Lily back to her apartment and locks her mother out of her room. The two begin passionately kissing and Aronofsky knowingly uses the Male Gaze for what follows. The two get on Nina’s bed, almost soiling the pink innocence which had previously ruled over Nina’s life, and Lily performs cunnilingus on Nina. We see a shot of Nina arching her back in pleasure and then looking down at Lily, cutting to Lily looking up at Nina. Only, the face that comes up is not Lily’s, but, again, an amalgam of Lily and Nina. She gets up and backs away and Lily’s face is back to normal. As Lily returns to performing oral sex, the tattoo on her back mutates and grows, looking down from the same angle that Nina would see it. We, and Nina, see every sinew in Lily’s back, almost in admiration. These perspective shots are inherent to understanding that, even in ecstasy, Nina still has no control.
What is interesting about these hedonistic sequences is that they are so subjective that it is revealed that neither really happened to the extent that we see them in the film. Nina may have gone clubbing, but the nightmare she endures is not the same story that Lily remembers. Nor did Lily and Nina have sex together. Nina is so fixated on competition that she may have begun to desire the same thing that she hates: herself. If Lily is indeed a manifestation of herself, to some extent, and what she needs to be, this strange process of maturation necessitates that she develop a monomania with discovering herself. Thomas suggests, after the gala, that Nina must play with herself in order to channel the carnal elements of the character she will play, but delving deep into her mind is something Nina has never done before, a piece of self-introspection that she has never had to do and thus is uncomfortable with. This is her vulnerable deranged mind fighting that, unable to cope with becoming a woman.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT - BLACK SWAN ONE
How did you do those scenes in the rehearsal rooms with the spinning camera? How did you hide the camera?
You used the word scares?
There are some where you're hiding the camera too, right?
We knew from the beginning that if we were making a film set in the ballet world with
doppelgangers and doubles, the mirror was going to be a huge character. One because
there's mirrors everywhere in a dance studio, and two because the reflection wold be a
part of the whole film. We started coming up with ways to reinvent the mirror scares.
Yeah. The mirror scare is one of the oldest cheap gags. Trying to figure out ways to be
fresh with was a big challenge for me and the team. We spent a lot of time trying to
figure out clever ways to scare people in ways they didn't expect. We did that with one-
way mirrors. We also digitally erased cameras. There's a really cool shot where Vincent
is watching Natalie dance, and the mirror goes by his face, and it should be reflected in
the mirror-- the camera is in the shot, it's just digitally pulled out.
Not really. Removing a camera is not the hardest thing in the world to do. That was our
whole approach for VFX, and kind of always been-- they're supporting the film. I never
give over to an animated movie, which is kind of what these big effects movies turn into.
The only element might be a photograph of the actor's face, but everything else is
constructed in the computer.
Given that you had initially planned for a bigger budget, is there an $80 million version of Black Swan in your head somewhere?
It seems like you suffered the most from the shrinking budget.
Given the Independent Spirit Awards nominations this morning, I was thinking about Clint Mansell's score, which is phenomenal but probably won't be eligible for Oscars because it uses so much Tchaikovsky.
How much do you work with him on things like this? You've worked together for so long.
Do you feel like you now know more?
You do it by breaking it up.
At the press conference in LA someone brought up The Wrestler being very masculine and this being about women, and you kind of played off the gender differences. But there are so many things in this movie that are specific to women, the way the ballerinas have their rivalries, the mother-daughter relationship, the sexuality of the way Vincent Cassel deals with his dancers. It's all so specific, and I wonder where you got that from?
I don't know about 80, but there's definitely a $25 million version, which we wanted in the
beginning and probably would have been a lot better on my heart.
It was really tough. It's always good to have a box that the budget creates, because in that you can
turn your limitations into your strengths, but this box was a bit too small. Every day was a pain
and really tough. It was a real hustle. and it was dangerous. Ballet is incredibly athletic, and thus
there's chances of injury, but we were very blessed and lucky to get through it.
Yeah, yeah. It is-- there's a lot of Tchaikovsky, and it's so recognizable-- but so much of it is Clint.
There's a lot of original stuff in it. Clint was inspired by Tchaikovsky, but so were many other
composers who won't be named. They've been stealing from him for a long time, and Clint's just
being more honest about it. It's a shame, because there's a lot more work put into this than
normal scores. You've got to basically pull it apart and reinterpret it for the screen.
I do somewhat. I'll show up in the dark, dark times, try and be a cheerleader. The
famous
Requiem
piece, that you hear in everything, was actually-- Clint in pre-production wrote
some ideas down. He made a CD of a few ideas he had that he did on his midi, and then he was
stuck at a certain point. He couldn't figure out what to write for the film. We listened to the CD
together, and there was this little snippet that's that famous piece-- it was in the middle of a song.
I said, "This could be good! Let's try this over the opening scene." We synched them up together,
and we played it, and that kind of triggered him. He does it all, but we've been working together
so long-- and I don't know much about music, but I can just sort of feel it when it works right.
Definitely. I definitely know the Tchaikovsky score, I listened to it nonstop for a year and a half.
It's interesting, if you had laid the Tchaikovsky over the film it would never have worked. It's
been used in Bugs Bunny and Volkswagen commercials, it's been in the public domain for years.
How to turn that stuff into something scary that works in a movie, that was the challenge.
Breaking it up, and looping certain things, and creating certain themes. Classical scores go up and
down, they're kind of hysterical in a way. And movie scores are much more-- they just drive and
move forward, and they build and can't go up and down at that same speed. It's a big job to turn
that into something that pushes the movie along.
I don't know. I think it comes from a lot of places. I grew up in a family with two very strong
women, my mother and my older sister, and they were big influences on my life. I've spent a
lifeloving women, and studying them as much as I can, or am allowed to. But I don't think this
whole Mars-Venus thing is as divisive as they put it out. I think we're all people, and the magic of
cinema is that you can see a movie about a six-year-old girl in Iran and completely connect. Her
experience is different from my experience and anyone in New York City's experience in
incredibly complicated ways, but you can understand her. So to me, if you paint a human
character with real emotions and really empathize with them, it doesn't matter if its a 50-
something aging wrestler, or 20-something ambitious dancer, they're just people.
But that's the end result. When you put it together you have to think about those gender differences.
The way she appears on the screen, she pops out of nowhere like this witchy figure. You're almost pushing that cliche and getting her to bring it back.
character in the ballet. We saw them as different figures of Rothbart. That was always a part of it.
Talking about the parallels to the ballet, the prince in this version of the story is Vincent
Cassel's character, but he's not really a worthy prince at all. He calls the women girls, he dominates them, and you've set him up as this figure of dominating masculinity in a movie that's otherwise all about women. Is that a comment on the role of gender dynamics in the ballet world?
And there's been rumors of people thinking it's a misogynist movie—
It's not.
Oh I know. That kind of interpretation drives me crazy.
A lot of the characters are based on people in my life. The mother-daughter relationship is based
on friends that I've experience, and rivalry is something I can get, and I've known characters like
Natalie' character, and I've known characters like Mila's character. you just try to make them
truthful. The real credit comes from the actors, who have to take these words and ideas and make
them real. And they were played by women. Barbara Hershey took something that could very
easily be a cliche, and brought great ambiguity and complexity to everything she did, so that
audiences can really read into it and feel it in different ways.
Yeah, yeah. Her and Vincent are kind of Natalie's jailers, they're kind of like the Rothbart
Natalie connects it to any kind of male-dominated system. Sure, you can read into that, and think
about it that way. She feels the film is a real feminist movie.
It's a very easy way to go with it. And there are certain cliches, but as Hubert Selby Jr. used to say
to me, "It's called a cliche because it's often true." But it's not just that. The Vincent character was
a really hard obstruction for Mark [Heyman], the writer, because it's very easy to make him one
thing. But what he did, and what Vincent ran with, is he kind of is an artist. Even though he's this
manipulative pig, it's all about the art. There's a nice balance and complexity. That whole scene
with Natalie when he tells her to go touch herself, it's really not that out of line. It's very
aggressive, but he's just trying to get on with it.