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The experimental film I have chosen to discuss in this following essay is Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky and released on 30 November 2010. Black Swan is about a young lady (Nina) who acquires the lead role in the play “Swan Lake”. The film focuses on Nina’s psychological struggle with suffering from a mental illness. The pressure of needing to be perfect, particularly for her mother and director/instructor leads to the deterioration of her condition.
“Everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious, the blacker and denser it is” –Carl Jung
Nina’s character growth is one of the important aspects of this production; from the beginning of the film, she seems to be an innocent child. Her room looks pink with children's pop art, her mom still tucks her into bed and she still sleeps with her spinning ballerina music box, she seems pure and innocent like a child. Nina’s mother has raised her in isolation where she has certainly not experienced life like other women her age. When she is chosen to play the Swan Queen she realizes that she is unable to play the Black Swan, which is the opposite of the White Swan. Nina’s lack of experience in life leads her into obsessing over perfecting the Black Swan. In order for Nina to be able to play this role she had to lose her innocence, we see this in the use of mise en scene. The colors of her costumes in the beginning of the film were mostly white and pink, symbolizing her innocence and childlike character, when she starts to transition the colors change to grey then black which symbolizes her dark side. She finally breaks free from her mother’s control and starts drinking, doing drugs, and engaging in sexual behaviors. Nina’s journey represents growth from a child to a woman.
The symbolism through the use of mirrors is one of the unique ways to tell a story, according to Riccardo Basso in the website Tasteofcinema.com, the use of mirrors creates a unique visual moment, as well as adding psychological nuances to the film. As a ballet dancer, Nina is bound to be surrounded by mirrors, for obvious reasons such as being able to point out her mistakes while rehearsing, not only that but Nina also cannot seem to escape her reflection. We experience Nina’s self-actualization through the mirrors and her destruction. Her journey of transitioning into the Black Swan helped in finding out who she indeed was instead of the little innocent girl that her mother conditioned her to be. Her destruction came when she started hallucinating; the mirrors fed her negative images, which led Nina to her death
The director enlightens the audience about the dangers of obsessive behavior and competitiveness. According to Healthline.com, the symptoms of Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder include finding it hard to express feelings, difficulty in forming or maintaining close relationships, hardworking but their obsession with perfection can make them inefficient, social isolation, and anxiety that occurs with depression all these symptoms describe Nina. The director takes us through the life struggles of people with OCPD who deal with daily simple routines. Schizophrenia is also a mental illness that Nina suffers from whereby she cannot differentiate what is from not.
The central theme in this production is perfection, we are shown the lengths that Nina is willing to take in order to achieve perfection and how easily one can be consumed so easily by something they love. For her to keep her role as the black Swan, Nina went to extreme lengths, she went as far as subconsciously stabbing Lily to her death in order for her not to have competition. Perfection is also something that is instilled in dancers, they have to maintain a certain weight, be a certain height or walk a certain way, and the pressure they go through is enough for any being to lose their mind. “Dancers oftentimes have many pressures put on them which can lead to physical and emotional damages. These damages occur through the pressures from the media, parents, teammates, and the stereotype that society has placed on dancers” The pressure of dancers, 123helpme.com.
The Black Swan is relevant to our production’s idea, concept, and theme because for our project we follow a contemporary dancer who suffers from Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a mental disorder according to MedlinePlus whereby survivors have unwanted and repeated thoughts, and feelings, ideas, sensations (obsession), and behaviors that drive them to do something over and over (compulsions). This affects the protagonist’s (Kim) dancing career in a way that she struggles to finish her dance routines, her dance steps are over repetitive. The protagonist’s intrusive thoughts develop into a silhouette of a man that is only visible to her which is a specific OCD type named Magical Thinking Intrusive Thoughts. “Magical Thinking Intrusive Thoughts – is the fear that even thinking about something bad will make it more likely to happen – sometimes also called ‘thought-action fusion’… They try to dispel them by performing rituals – magic rituals, in effect – that are often bizarre and time-consuming and involve linking actions or events that could not possibly be related to each other” (OCDUK, 2019). Her intrusive thoughts will inform her day-to-day actions, the OCD will cause her to perform rituals to cancel the negative thoughts that come to mind, such as feeling the need to repeat steps or go back and start again to ‘prevent’ something bad from happening. An example of an intrusive thought that would come to mind of someone with OCD would be ‘you won’t get the part’ or ‘someone is going to die’. So to prevent it from happening she feels that she has to do something to cancel it out like putting things in order. The journey Kim is going through is similar to Nina in the film Black Swan because they both want to strive for perfection.
What makes the chosen production, Black Swan experimental is how it makes you question what is real and not, it is confusing until the end where it sorts sums everything together and this was a brilliant and unique way to tell the story. At first, the production seems like a melodrama because of the elements it featured such as making us feel Nina’s emotions through the use of music and her storyline which heightens the audience’s emotions “Broadly, melodrama is a type of narrative in which the over-dramatic plot-line is designed to play on people's emotions—sometimes at the expense of character development, sub-text, and nuance.
Moreover, melodramas tend to feature reductive plot lines and characters that are stereotypical archetypes” (White, D. 2018). There are also elements of horror whereby Nina peels off her skin and her scary hallucination, fusing these two genres together was very impressive. The use of editing when Nina fully transitions into an actual black swan was very experimental, the attention to detail whereby we can see each and every feather growing on her arms and back, her legs breaking like that of Aswan was spectacular.
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