Wednesday 26 March 2014

Black Swan Resource 1 - Notes


The pressure to perform as the more sensual half of her stage persona, the Black Swan, becomes more than the sheltered ballerina can bear and her internalizing, masochistic personality rears its ugly head. 

Nina is forced to contend with the presence of a new dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), who embodies all the qualities the company’s smarmy stage director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), is looking for.

psychologically fragile ballerina becomes reckless as her relationship with Lily — and her overbearing, veteran ballerina mother (Barbara Hershey) — starts to transform her.

While the film is drawing comparisons to everything from The Red Shoes and Repulsion, to Mulholland Drive and Dostovesky’s The Double.

Black Swan’s tension deliciously teeters between the visible reality (the gorgeous, competitive, and strenuous world of ballet) and the hidden netherworld (the anxious, repressed, and viscerally terrifying traumas of ballet’s inhabitants) of Nina’s subconscious.

like an exploitative, male-laden fantasy, but this “other” perspective — which sometimes feels like an outsider’s view of a feminine world, quite deliberately — plays with the notion that Nina is always living her life on the outside, through the wants and needs of others.

Ballet itself is full of doppelgängers – sylph-like creatures who on stage appear nearly identical.

Nina is so completely fractured by her own anxiety on the climb to perfection that she becomes a vessel for those around her — absorbing their neuroses and complications. This creates a kind of hive mind — a collective psyche torn and bursting at the seams – where twinness and duality reign.

Creation is only possible by way of destruction, characters who at first appear to be cruel are later seen as kind, symmetry is fearful – not comforting, cracked and twisted and torn limbs belie the beauty of the dance, and the uncoiling of it all is never-ending.

Nina’s strained and suffocating relationship with her mother, Erica, is at the heart of her disintegration. As a former dancer, her mother puts an immense amount of pressure on Nina to not only be the best, but also to never grow up. Nina is referred to as “girl” by her mother, her bedroom is decorated for an adolescent, and the nature of ballet itself is rampant with social physique anxiety – the pressure to maintain a lithe (young, girl-like) figure. 

It makes sense that the camera trails behind her — acting as much as a voyeur to the spectacle of Nina’s descent, as a specter of her disconnected sensibility. Mirrors and reflections become other characters in the film, reminiscent of Primo Levi’s story, The Mirror Maker. Timoteo was born in a family of mirror makers, but had a vision of putting his own twist on the looking glass. His “Metamir” was a flexible mirror, that when applied to the forehead would reflect the looker’s perceptions rather than reality. On his mother, Timoteo was reflected as the perfect angel. On his girlfriend, he saw a broken and weak man. On another woman, Timoteo was reflected as the ideal man. The illusions and invented narratives of Nina’s life eventually overtake her, and she becomes a Metamir herself – reaching to preserve her very existence by nature of these doubles.

They remind us that Nina’s point of view is unreliable, as her reflections manifest themselves channeled through the eyes of her mother, her mentor, her rivals, and her audience. That she often double-takes at the appearance of her own mirror image, and identifies herself in the faces of strangers on the street more than her own reflection.

This constant push and pull between Nina and Erica happens throughout the film (strip/shield, heal/harm, etc.). Kristeva goes on to introduce parallels to Thomas — who is at once a father surrogate and the object of Nina’s naïve psychosexual attachment. It’s easy to see how he falls into place surrounding the idea of “Repelling, rejecting”. 

Clockwork Orange - Home Invasion (Analysis Table)


Mirror Stage (No Country For Old Men)

One film that can be referenced to demonstrate the Mirror Stage is No Country For Old Men. We are able to relate to the characters, understanding that the world has become a very different place, one with new threats and an evil which is harder to understand. This is conveyed through the viewpoint of the Sheriff who has grown old and is coming to the end of his career. We understand this new world from his perspective, yet we see ourselves in him, either as uncertain as to what the future holds for us, or reflective on the past which no longer applies to the new world. In a sense this can be seen to reinforce the establishment of traditional theories constructed by white heterosexual males, as the audience is seen to align with the sheriff who complies to these same features of traditional theorists. There is also the element of following three characters throughout the film, allowing us to view the events in different places, making us feel as though we are god-like, all-seeing and all-powerful.

        





Wednesday 12 March 2014

Spectatorship Theory & Full Metal Jacket

Reception theory deals with two main aspects, the exploration of meaning in film and a response to film. Meaning refers to the film being decoded after the spectator has viewed it. Meaning is concluded from specific themes and scenes. Response is how the spectator reacts to the film as a whole, without decoding any deeper meaning.

Theorists believe that what we desire in a film, is central to understanding spectatorship. There are three types of film we can look for:

- An intellectually demanding film
- One which is provocative
- One which is throw away spectacular fun

It is also believed that the key element to spectatorship is central imaging, the thing responsible for immersing us within the film.This is the idea that the film can recreate moments that provide a sensation, or moments we can relate to e.g. falling over or being ill. These opportunities to central imaging are enhanced with facilities such as the Imax.

Pulp Fiction

The director establishes these sequences as a construct on the grounds they are realistic scenarios that we can relate to, we buy into the belief that the films are in fact a reality. This can be concluded from the awkward silences in conversation and the drama that is established around provided the adrenaline shot. The reality is also constructed from conversational tone in the restaurant. These makes us respond to the film with sensations on the ability to relate, in addition to a variety of emotions towards the characters e.g sympathy for the woman, in relation to the pain from the injection shot, which we have internalised as something that hurts. This is communicated as a result of extra-textual information.    


Duality of Man

This idea of the duality of man is referenced in the film Full Metal Jacket, in the conversation between a Pogue Colonel and Private Joker. The term duality of man is said to be invoked with Private Joker's wearing of a peace badge, whilst his helmet reads "born to kill", conveying what appears to be two different types of view. This is to reflect two sides of man and how we change or adapt to our conditions and environment. It promotes how good men with a strong sense of morality can be recondition into unjustifiable killers. The idea of being recondition, processed and stricken of individual identity, is reinforced through the opening scene, which captures a montage of new recruits having their heads shaven, with no one focus on anyone in particular. The same applies to the constant abuse the recruits receive from the drill sergeant.

The audience gets drawn into the excitement in the final scenes, as the platoon are pinned down by a sniper in a distant building. As they proceed into the building after having lost a couple of men, they locate the sniper. On revealing the sniper, as she lies on the ground fattily wounded, they discover that the sniper is in fact a woman. Upon this discovery, the audience then feel guilt after having been roped into the excitement of the conflict. Linking back to the Duality of Man, we see compassion coming through from Private Joker, who hesitates a long while before shooting the sniper, to put her out of her misery and rid her of the pain. He is still reluctant in shooting a woman, which demonstrates a duality of man in the way characters act even after they have been reconditioned.