Black Swan

I love this film’s ability to convey a message or leave up to your interpretation without using dialogue. The Black Swan directed by Darren Aronofsky uses many different ways to produce a certain feeling. One thing that I really liked about this film was the use of color to show changes in the main character. In the beginning of the film, she mainly dresses in white, showing purity and innocence. Then later on after meeting Lily, she begins to wear black, symbolizing her coming to terms with her sexuality and imperfections. Of course, this also ties into the title, Nina strives to be the perfect ballet dancer for the part, and finally gets it when she comes into touch with her more “evil” side and transforms into the black swan. I really admire the stark contrast of changing from white to black, it’s not subtle, and I think it’s hard to miss in this film, which I think was a good choice made by the director. The feeling I get when watching this movie is pretty eerie, the film has a grey and dark blue undertone, there are not many colors except when Nina wears pale pink and her bedroom, and also a very small but important scene where Nina goes to a club with Lily, as she’s walking through the dance floor the colors switch from green to red.

 

The director also made a very good use of mirrors in this film. There were many shots where Nina was in the bathroom or the dressing room before dancing. You could see her reflection in her mirror as she talked to Lily or when she strives for perfection, or when someone wrote “whore” in red lipstick on the mirror in the bathroom. Another scene depicts Nina getting fitted for her performance, not only is the camera angle amazing, showing the effect of two mirrors facing each other and having the image being mirrored over and over again, Nina is asked to take off her shrug, where the audience can see scratches on her back left shoulder. Her reflection is then shown to be scratching her in that spot, however, Nina isn’t moving.

The director’s use of camera angles and movement also had a very big impact on the film. One of my favorite moments in the Black Swan was when Nina was auditioning for the role of the white swan and her evil twin, the black swan. While she struggled to fill the role of the black song for most of the movie, when she danced the camera moved and spun around with her, creating a pretty dizzying but spectacular effect. This was also put into effect during her final performance, she was paranoid and after being spun around a few times she ended up falling, the way the camera was positioned we saw things from her perspective and then back to looking at her and back to her perspective, this creating a very fast and tense environment.

Probably my favorite aspect of the film was the symbolism between Lily and Nina. Nina was the white swan and Lily represented the black swan. The reason I think this is because in the movie the more Nina got involved with Lily the more of her bad side came out, she was less controlled. I believe the biggest piece of evidence was during the final performance after she was on as the white swan and fell she went back into her dressing room and found Lily there dressed up as the black swan saying that she was going to play the final act since Nina fell. However, Nina attacks her and slams her into the mirror, and as Lily is choking Nina, Nina grabs a shard of broken mirror and stabs Lily in the abdomen. This is when she makes the transformation into the black swan, her eyes go red and she embraces the change in herself, she’s more loose and seductive in her movements. When she returns to the dressing room someone knocks on the door and it turns out to be Lily, confusing Nina. During the last scene we see blood form on her abdomen, and when her performance is over, she’s bleeding heavily and tells Thomas she felt perfect. There was such symbolism in the last few scenes. While she was playing the swan queen in the movie, she was actually living the play as well. Lily was the evil twin and the director of the play was the prince, Lily was seducing the director (Thomas) but Nina becomes the black swan and seduces him but ended up killing herself to finally free herself from the constant burden she puts on herself to be perfect all the time. This was foreshadowed earlier in the film when she was explaining the play to a man, and he said the ending was really sad, however, Nina called it beautiful.

The restricted narration which according to the text ” limits the information it provides the audience to things known only to a single character”. Throughout the whole movie, we only see things from Nina’s perspective, and we follow her until her drive for perfection drives her insane, which is seen very well in the final scenes. The audience watches her murder Lily, but because we have another perspective, we think it’s real, only until Nina comes back to find out she didn’t actually do that, hence the “going insane”.

 

Sources referenced

Barsam and Monahan Looking at Movies fifth edition

Aronofsky, Darren, Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz, John J. McLaughlin, Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer, Brian Oliver, Scott Franklin, Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder, Matthew Libatique, Andrew Weisblum, Clint Mansell, Benjamin Millepied, and Peter I. Tchaikovsky. Black Swan. Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 2011.

youtube- Black Swan #5 Movie CLIP – The Fitting (2010) HD

Black Swan (2/5) Movie CLIP – Attack It! (2010) HD

 

One thought on “Black Swan

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