Tuesday, January 25, 2011

BLACK SWAN AS CINEMATIC POVERTY


I apologized to humanity for this film already. Now I will destroy it on a theoretical level never seen. Here we go, this film can be debased on several levels. First, it attorns the stylings of Cronenberg, Polanski and Powell & Pressburger. One sees The Fly, Repulsion and The Red Shoes so thoroughly throughout we are then forced to confront what elements Aronofsky posits: lack of an authorial input, a confused female empowerment, simple symbology that yields little impact, and a lack of a cinematographic plan. Such, as I will prove, leads to a film that works on absolutely no levels. I only could laugh at its cinematic poverty and hope for revenge with Aronofsky being sentenced in a needed future cinema court that will work along the lines of Cinematic Justice to give him only a life hard labor with no hope of parole, which the pain he will go through sums up what I felt watching his film.


Aronofsky openly borrowed from films and filmmakers. Art is formed out of other art. Yet, what he formed was too referential, too unimaginative, and probably due to lack of vision. There is no greater purpose to what he was trying to author. He just seemed to be making a pretentious film. Take the whole story for example, it is based on a two sentence description of a common and non-challenging ballet. It is ballet nonetheless to Aronofsky, so that counts as histrionics to him. He then uses his ballet film to explore the lives of ballerinas in some scenes, but this is unnecessary. He wants to create The Sporting Life at times just to say he did his ethnographic work, but the film is not trying to be about ballet. Aronofsky sets his sights on larger themes, so why do we care of the main character's feet bleed? Strike one of many for Aronosfky.

Then there is this obnoxious female empowerment, a Halloween-style patriarchal fascism of the virginal female battling her sexuality to ultimately gain sin and death. Is Aronofsky even in the 21st century? The conversation intellectually is now about ontology (Judith Butler, the Trans community's battles) and sexual positivity (the Third Wave's immense logic and that influence). The mythos that Aronofsky could of eluded to in Black Swan barely delves into the horror of female submission that has existed since the first class antagonism of man over women when Homo sapiens left tribal society. Something that Catherine Breillat's films do and with such intelligence, but where is her award show nominations and Hollywood financing? His analysis barely moves beyond that of teenager, that wonders why boys can explore and girls cannot, but cannot grasp the larger picture. Can women expect to gain strength from such a film?

With Aronosfky's symbology, he makes the good and virginal main character wear white the whole film and gives the evil one a tattoo and makes her wear black. She smokes cigarettes, does drugs and engages in promiscuous sex. She is a sitcom character put into a film that fashions itself as high art. The virgin battles this character, engages in an unneeded lesbian scene, then starts to take on her attributes. Rebelling against her authoritarian mother and coming into her own. With film, simple symbols can give one measurable result, as with the color schemes in a film like Godard's Weekend or the simple, but profound resonance of images in the films of Robert Bresson. We do not have this with Black Swan due to cinematographic issues, as I state later, but also due to the inane nature of what he expounds. Then, with his surrealist moments, Aronosfky uses the template of good battling the evil within and the fact there were swans in Swan Lake. We have Portman seeing her face on people in the street and in other main characters, but this device becomes stale quick because it's too obvious and founded on themes that cannot carry weight. And we are just uncertain of why she is battling herself. Then there is Portman turning into a black swan. The Cronenberg influenced transformation metaphor lacks Cronenberg's intellectual poeticism. It seems due to the lack of purpose for this film to exist, is Aronosfky's got is a budget to do a bit of FX and there are swans in the ballet he was supposedly inspired by, so that is why he does them.

Then the camera work leaves little to be desired. Aronosfky's admixture of cinema verite with more formalistic shots believes it is adding heightened emotion and realism to the real and surreal. Aronosfky in this film is mixing what he did in The Wrestler and The Fountain. The combination of both though was not calculated enough. Just to do a through experiment, the usage of handheld with non-handheld in Lar Von Trier's Antichrist, just to note is a film that dealt with similar themes to Black Swan, was a part of that film's system. The system of Black Swan is a cluster of images that are sometimes handheld and sometimes not, with no differentiation, which means there is not the magnification of what little Aronosfky has or could say. He has to also think his cinema verite leads to emotion or realism, so when he shoots that way sometimes, he probably then justifies it to himself later. 

VERDICT: TOTAL SHIT. This is a film that has surrealism and realism, pretension, muddled feminism, influence from great filmmakers and films. This film, dealing with areas that would be SW approved, as a whole is too simple and too unaware of its pretension that we are given a crucial film. We should of come to expect this from studying Aronosfky previous work, that he doesn't have much to say, but he tries to say it in stylized (Pi, Requiem For A Dream), gimmick (Pi), psuedo-political (The Wrestler, Black Swan) and pseudo-intellectual (The Fountain, Pi, Black Swan) ways that fool the audience.

8 comments:

  1. I agree with you. In my mind, a film like this exemplifies everything Shooting Wall is against. It really is totally trash. Add to the list of rip offs Images by Robert Altman, which if you watch after seeing the Black Swam it is actually pretty amazing how much Aronofsky stole from Altman. Not to mention Bergman's Persona and Altman's other great 70s film Three Women. This is the kind of film that is destroying cinema and the critical establishment is doing nothing about it; they are simply rolling over and giving this film all kinds of awards and accolades. This must be stopped! This film is total and utter nonsense. In ten to fifteen years, people are going to be watching Black Swan as a midnight movie and laughing at how campy and cheesy it is. Films like Black Swan should be destroyed and critics giving Black Swan glowing reviews are pieces of shit.

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  2. There are many, many movie patrons at work who are telling me how much they love this movie, and the problem is that all of them are women, so the biggest question for me is why can we understand the flaws of Black Swan's depiction of female characters, but actual women themselves don't see it?

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  3. OK, now I really can't believe you're serious. This is a parody of a film review. You gave me a good laugh, thank you. Any true cinematic revolutionary can see that Black Swan is one of the most exciting films in years. It reinvents the genre, informed by the greatest works of Polanski and Powell/Pressburger it subverts expectations and succeeds as a modern masterpiece.

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  4. Dear CaptZeep. Black Swan does none of the things that you say it does. It is a totally obvious, laughable, and unoriginal piece of cinematic trash. Aronofosy has proven himself to be a hack. He does not rework Polanski, as much as he steals from him and does it badly and without grace. You are the enemy of cinema, CaptZeep and I can see now that this is obvious. Black Swan is one of the worst films or this or any other year. You are welcome to buy into the hype, however, I suspect in 10 or 15 years everyone will be laughing about this film and, most likely, they will be laughing at you as well for liking this film and posting such an inane and uninformed comment. You obvisously have no idea what you are talking about. Just because you know the names Polanski and Powell/Pressburger does not mean you know anything about film, as evidenced by your above post. A modern masterpiece Black Swan is not and will never be. You, my enemy, are a laughing stock and a joke. I would really be very interested to see your films because if they are anything like Black Swan they would be pure trash.

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  5. If my films were anything like Black Swan I'd be a universally admired, award winning filmmaker, selling millions of tickets to very satisfied audiences. Food for thought. Maybe it's time to call off the cinematic revolution.

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  6. This proves just how much the cinematic revolution is needed. In a year when bad and mediocre films are winning awards and being universally admired, it just shows how lazy and corrupt the entire system has become. Perhaps instead of feeling so passionately about bad cinema and taking comfort in "selling millions of tickets," we should be asking ourselves why terrible cinema is thriving. If selling millions of tickets and being universally admired is your standard for great cinema, then I guess Adam Sandler is a genius. The only food for thought you have given Shooting Wall, CaptZeep is that we definitely need to go on so that people like you cannot continue to have their way and terrible cinema can die. I would suggest you think about this, but I fear all hope is already lost with you.

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  7. How is your cinematic revolution going to change the fact that people will go to see movies that appeal to them (i.e. Black Swan, Iron Man, Toy Story 3) and will stay away from stuff that is so boring it doesn't stay in theaters for more than a week (i.e. Blue Beard, Trash Humpers, and anything by Godard)?

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  8. By offering venues and outlets for both filmmakers and audiences who want to see this films and engage in cinema on an intellectual level. We understand that the films were advocate will probably never be big hits or appeal to a mass audience, that is not the point. Our point is to have an alternative to the mainstream both in Hollywood and in independent cinema, which we feel has dropped the ball on making meaningful and interesting films. We will want to create new forms and outlets for people who have different visions and voices to be seen outside of what has become a lazy mainstream both audiences and film criticism. All we want to do is create a cinema for people who want to see it; we are not trying to appeal to a mass audience, but appeal to people who want to see the kind of cinema we advocate. We want to create the theaters, the festivals, and the venues where people can come see Trash Humpers, Blue Beard, Godard, et al. with like minded people who want to discuss these films. We are not interest in immediate gratification and if a film doesn't do well in its opening weekend, then it is a failure. The revolution is about utilizing new technology to make sure cutting edge and thoughtful are getting to the people who want to see them and we are not left with only Black Swan, Toy Story, etc. Cinematic success does not and should not be equated with financial success. We are against the corporatized, captialistic mindset of American cinema.

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