BLACK SWAN
Black swan‘s 2010 film, FOX SEARCHLIGHT
PICTURES in association with CROSS CREEK PICTURES presents a DARREN ARONOFSKY
film “BLACK SWAN” . Black swan movie content strong
sexual content, disturbing violent images, language and some drug use. The
movie has release on 12/3/2010 and DVD released on 20/3/2010. The movie opens as
Nina Sayers (NATALIE PORTMAN), a young ballerina in her middle twenties, is
dancing the opening part to Swan Lake. Swan Lake is a ballet in which a
princess is turned into the White Swan and can only be turned back if a man
swears endless loyalty to her. In the ballet, she is betrayed by the Black
Swan, the evil magician's daughter whom the magician has transformed to look accurately
like the princess so as to trick the prince who has fallen in love with her.
End
of the movie, the princess attended suicide because the Prince's disloyalty has
doomed her to remain a swan forever. As Nina dances in the role of the
Princess, the magician appears and places the nuisance on the Princess. Nina
then wakes up in her bungalow, the dance sequence having been a dream. She begins
her daily ballet stretching and use to tell her mother about her dream as her
mother unintentionally ignores her. Nina mentions that the director, Thomas
Leroy (pronounced Tomas; the name is French), of her ballet company has
promised to feature her more this season and her mother agrees that she's been
there long enough.
Before I can
provide you with a decent Black
Swan movie analysis, we first
need to take a look at the overall plot of the film. This section is filled
with spoilers, so you might consider skipping this part if you‘ve yet to see
the film. Black swan is set in
New York City, where a respected ballet company is making plans to put on a
production of Swan Lake.
Aging ballet superstar Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder) has been kicked to the
curb, and company director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) is looking for some
fresh meat to fill the dual lead role of the White Swan and the Black Swan.
In the
scene, which Nina present one of the most tricky dances and end up developing
black swan wings was realised as an arrangement live action, motion capture and
computer graphic. They spend a lot of time in preproduction on the design of
the wings and what the final character would look like; Darren wanted the
anatomy of the human transition into the anatomy of a swan. They actually ended
up buying us a swan skeleton which we digitised and created 3d net of to morph
into a human skeleton, it was great to study and do research into how is the structure of the wing and a human
arm can morph into each other.
Artists
described the thought of giving the personality many swan attributes, not only
for the wings. In the real, Darren wanted to have long neck shape but it was
always just a little bit goofy looking. It’s a beautiful moment in the film an
in Nina’s head the wings were such a beautiful vision, and Natalie Portman is
really so beautiful, that it didn’t really need much more than that. So we
ended up with a wing growth and feathers creeping up her neck only just a
little bit.
New
York based curious pictures erected a motion capture set up on the college
location using 24 Vicon cameras to film a professional dancer carrying out the
moves. It was little bit of a jerry rig to get a sound stage set up with a
motion control rig onto a location. That they did meant have to augment our
motion capture data hand tracking, but it was important to start with that basis
as far as the actual ballet dance.
Other than that, Thomas who encourages
Nina to have a high regard for the company's new ballerina, funky free
spirit and Olympic standard minx Lily (Mila Kunis), who helps release Nina's
life which force with seductive overtures of friendship, and more. But Lily
simply wants to steal Nina's role. As Nina's concern intensifies, she is
worried about a strange feathery skin rash and it becomes swayed that her sign
in the mirror continues to stare at her after she has turned away.
But,
in piece of evidence, with its creepy Manhattan interiors, its scary, close up
camera movements, and its surrounding conspiracy of evil, it looks more like
Rosemary's Baby, particularly in cinematographer really brilliant and clever continuously
explored in which Nina went out with some random guys in a club, and she then
wakes up to turns to what she's doing and freaked out, blunders through shadowy
winding corridors and out into the night air, there seems no difference between
inside and outside. Everywhere is claustrophobic.
As
the ballet movie has to be compared with Michael Powell and Emeric Press
burger’s The Red Shoes, and the figure of Thomas is observably encouraged by
Anton Walbrook's renowned martinet. Although, Thomas is rather less high minded
and Nina's aggressive in rehearsal is also taken from Powell and Press burger.
But again, their influence might be more from the convent
drama Black Narcissus, and the final
confrontation of Kathleen Byron and Deborah Kerr. There are also hints of John
Landis's An American Werewolf in London.
This
happens to be the second film recently that has used the Swan Lake theme, Xavier
Beauvoir’s Of Gods and Men featured it counter naturally, at the disaster of a severe
and spiritual tale of French monks. Its use in Black Swan is self-explanatory, it
is more obviously grandiloquent and excessive and appropriate to the fireworks
going off in Nina's head.
In both cases, the Swan Lake theme is
technically digenetic, in that the music is physically present in the story,
being played respectively on the monks' old tape machine and in the orchestra
pit. But my goodness, Aronofsky likes to play that Swan Lake theme loud. He's
probably right to do so. Gloriously
direct music needs to be punched over, and punched over it is. Motor head could
not have played the Swan Lake theme any louder than this. I left the cinema
with blood trickling from my ears.
Black
Swan is ionospherically over the top, and some of its effects are overdone, but
it is richly, sensually enjoyable and there is such fascination in seeing
Portman surrender to the madness and watch her face transmute into a
horror-mask like a nightmare version of Maria Callas. It is exciting, quite mad
and often really scary.
by,
YOGESWARY ARUMUGAM
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