An analysis of Black Swan

laviza khan niazi
13 min readMar 11, 2021

A psychologically prompting movie for mental health

Written by — Student Name

Darren Aronofsky’s artful dance psycho-acting is a sparkling, popping, ludicrously packable scab of a film that is fabulously disturbed consistently. Nina Sayers, a youthful ballet dancer played by Natalie Portman, is the focal point of the film. She is appealing, defenseless, sincerely juvenile, and inclined to dysfunctional behavior. Nina should plunge profound into her clouded side to satisfy a truly incredible piece. Imaginative advancement crashes into an anxious emergency as her mind flights and nervousness manifestations deteriorate in blend with her practice improvement. The dread of the entrance, the dread of your substance, dread of being replaced in the kind gestures of an influential man, love of flawlessness, love of dance, and maybe in particular, enthusiastic and utter contempt of your mom are large subjects investigated in this film (Edelstein, 2010). Dark Swan is the best examination of female disintegration since Polanski’s Repulsion. Be that as it may, to be sure, with her crepuscular Manhattan inside, her limited, close-up camera developments, and her encompassing connivance of wickedness, Rosemary’s Baby looks more like the splendid ceaseless shot of film producer Matthew Libatique, wherein Nina takes an irregular person in a club and afterward awakens to what he does. It’s claustrophobic all over the place (Jolin, 2011).

Dark Swan is a magnum opus of film, a masterpiece — and, similar to Roman Polanski’s revamp of Showgirls, a camp work of art, as I would see it. If it wasn’t so cudgelling, you may make some decent memories taking a gander at it and its ridiculous Freudian adages. Despite the social contrasts between display wrestling and expressive dance, Aronofsky’s last film The Wrestler, which Black Swan’s co-scenarist Mark Heyman chipped away at, makes for a decent partner piece (Bradshaw, 2011). Dark Swan, similar to The Wrestler, is established in physicality and investigates the body’s limits, just as the manners in which it ultimately deceives us. It takes a great deal of agony to make the sensation of a fragile living creature and bone being pushed and rebuffed almost substantial. Close-ups with breaking heels, Goosebumps, and draining torn nails are extraordinary and agitating now and again. Behind the stage rivalry, innovative jealousy, and an extraordinary masterpiece reflected in the existences of those doing it are generally present in “Dark Swan” (Dargin, 2010). Aronofsky shockingly floats away from those reliable guidelines and into Nina’s head. She begins to stir up limits. The film starts with a fantasy, and it before long becomes clear that her waking and dream lives are interlaced. Aronofsky and Portman are unafraid to go anyplace this leads them. A few crowds will be helped to remember Aronofsky’s past highlight, “The Wrestler.” Both show resolute polished skill chasing a vocation that annihilates individual lives. I was likewise recounted Aronofsky’s virtuoso first time at the helm, “Pi” (1998), about a man-made crazy by his journey for a definitive numerical language. Truly, his 2007 film “The Fountain” was about a man who appears to have vanquished reality. The characters in Aronofsky’s movies are fastidious organizers.

It’s difficult to see Darren Aronofsky’s close work of art Black Swan without thinking about the 1948 magnum opus The Red Shoes, which has a comparable subject. Even though Black Swan doesn’t exactly arrive at the statures of The Red Shoes, it is an exciting and hypnotizing film with a professional characterizing execution by Natalie Portman that will be recognized as one of her truly extraordinary minutes in what will without a doubt be a long Hollywood vocation. For other people, Black Swan might be an intense film to acknowledge, when it appears to commend the incongruity, obsessiveness, and narcissistic quintessence of such a fixation on imaginative greatness (Bradshaw, 2011). Dark Swan is a film that should be watched and altogether delighted in, regardless of whether just for the authority of the film’s prosperity. Matthew Libatique’s cinematography is suggestive of early Polanski or even Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, with wide visual symbolism that matches both the polish and effortlessness of the expressive dance just as the broke setting in which our situation unfurls. Even though Portman may appear to be an improbable decision for such a nuanced and personally dull part from the start, she is projected. Nina should be amazingly caring, wondrous, and uncertain to be influential, while as yet having the option to extend the sort of fragile brokenness that permits the watcher to accept her pieces without being repelled by them and removing themselves from the dramatic experience (Ebert, 2010).

It’s difficult to clarify Black Swan without parting with much more data than one can in an outline or even a conversation of the film. The dramatic experience of Black Swan is similar to seeing a mental vortex of delirium, craziness, compulsiveness, fixation, and fancies, and it is substantially more than simply seeing a show. The film is pointlessly theatrical, a quality that would unavoidably aggravate a few crowds while staying consistent with the truth happening onscreen (Goldberg, 2010). Even though turning the mental embroidery of the film, Aronofsky never appears to favour one side with Nina, passing judgment on her to be crazy or grand. Dark Swan is the best assessment of female breaking down since Polanski’s Repulsion. However, with its unsavoury Manhattan inner parts, drawing nearer, close-up camera improvements, and encasing stunt of deception, it looks more like Rosemary’s Baby, particularly in cinematographer Matthew Libatique stunning relentless shot in which Nina makes out with a subjective individual in a club, by then stirs to what in particular precisely she’s doing and, went crazy, goofs through overcast winding corridors and out into the street. It’s claustrophobic everywhere (Macaulay, 2011).

By recording a strange, suspenseful thrill ride in film verity style, Black Swan takes a huge risk, yet it pays off abundantly. The camerawork of Libatique moves and skims with the entertainers as well as carries an extraordinary feeling of authenticity to the main portion of the film so when Nina goes completely crazy, you’re enchanted and spellbound by her crazy reality. The staggering cinematography makes a tactile encounter that is at the same time prompt and extraordinary (Macaulay, 2011). Darren Aronofsky, the essayist, and chief sensationalize Nina’s change into a more generalized animal, just as the fantasies that follow that change — wonderfully, hotly, expressionistically. As the areas move and doppelgangers show up left and right, the camera tracks Nina’s thin neck about a foot behind her. Nina’s appearance in mirrors has taken on an unmistakable overflow of energy. Her substance sprouts are yucky, padded stuff. There are frightful assaults that could conceivably be valid.

“Dark Swan,” a witchy blend of frenzy and tricky, tells the story of a ballet performer who yearns to break out of the corps, with wounded feet and an inexorably confined psyche. The youthful artist Nina, played by Natalie Portman in a wounding, rushing about the show, resembles a kid as opposed to a grown-up. A multitude of toys looks after Nina as she heads to sleep around evening time, a close-by adornments box tinkling “Swan Lake,” deep-rooted pals who, as Nina and this insanely interesting film become more unhinged, will, in general, look more like guards than family members. The plot follows the “Swan Lake” artful dance in enormous, progressively twisted strokes, packed with twins — carbon copies, mutilated pictures, doppelgängers. It starts with Thomas (Vincent Cassel), the imaginative head of an imaginary New York expressive dance organization, reporting that the new season would open with an “instinctive and credible” form of that old top choice. Keeping that in mind, he fires Beth (Winona Ryder), his prima ballet performer, and replaces her with Nina, who will move both the swan sovereign (a charmed woman in bird structure) and her disgusting dark twin. As the strain mounts, however, things begin to self-destruct, or Nina does. She snaps herself out of a fit and starts scratching at her skin.

She pulls a cut off her finger as though she were stripping a banana one day. “Dark Swan,” which is part tormented craftsman dramatization and part tony workmanship house amusement gives off an impression of being a tony craftsmanship house diversion. (There’s additionally a Lincoln Center!) Its jubilant, frequently shabby misuse film adroit, however, is the thing that gives it a shock. Darren Aronofsky is a knowledgeable cineaste, and in “Dark Swan,” he references Michael Powell and Emeric Press burger’s artful dance show-stopper “The Red Shoes,” just as the pair’s “Dark Narcissus.” Mr. Aronofsky, who was brought into the world in 1969 and experienced childhood in Brooklyn, is likewise prone to have frequented Times Square when it was known as the deuce. Film royal residences are covering the roads, showing the best and most exceedingly awful of trash motion pictures. I’m certain he watched a couple of scenes of “Red Shoe Diaries” on the link too. That isn’t an analysis. One of the delights of “Dark Swan” is its absence of regard for the elitist universe of dance, which can be pretty much as creepy as a sepulchre to pariahs (Propes, 2010). Mr. Aronofsky makes this world (or his adaptation of it) entrancing by uncovering the difficulties and unbearably difficult work that goes into making impeccable moves. Nina pirouettes effortlessly, yet she additionally breaks her toes and puts her fingers down her throat to throw up her feast (the sound plan gets each snap and crunch).

Right off the bat in Black Swan, imaginative chief Thomas Leroy closes his abstract of Swan Lake by announcing that the discouraged hero will just discover freedom in death. Vincent Cassel plays Leroy, whose three-sided head peruses to me as undeniably shrewd, and he withdrew and premonition depiction of Tchaikovsky’s artful dance, joined with his Continental articulation, quickly helps me to remember a comparative scene in The Red Shoes, the most enduring film set in the realm of artful dance. “It’s stunning how rapidly time passes. Love zooms by. The ostentatiously grandiose and alluring Lermontov of Anton Walbrook proclaims, “Life races by…” (Jolin, 2011). Our champion tracks down a concise feeling of reclamation without anyone else mutilation and, following Leroy’s orders, masturbation, a propensity for which she is by all accounts new, which is one of the huge warnings that something isn’t exactly directly about Nina. Dissimilar to The Wrestler, Black Swan’s emphasis on genuineness is only a venturing stone to the film’s last objective, the universe of medications and savage psychological instability, making Aronofsky relinquish his set plan to expressionistic subjectivity (Dargin, 2010).

Darren Aronofsky has made no mystery of the way that Black Swan is a partner piece to The Wrestler, his Oscar-designated film from 2008. What’s more, thinking about their more cleaned and tenuous topic, it shows that these two movies share more for all intents and purpose than, say, Powell and Press burger’s span addition to ultra of artful dance films, The Red Shoes, or even the similarly styled All About Eve. Both Black Swan and The Wrestler are set in gritty behind the stage regions, with Nina’s (Natalie Portman) Spartan breezeblock-walled changing area being nearer than you would suspect to The Wrestler’s perspiration showered exercise centres. Nina over and again scoring the soles of her pointe shoes to give them more flex (a distant reverberation of Mickey Rourke’s Ram’ shaving his face with a secret sharp edge to create a group satisfying drain) and luxurious consideration on little, obscure schedules, for example, Nina consistently scoring the soles of her pointe shoes to give them more flex Both heavenly dramatization — and some wriggle ’n’ recoil minutes — from the incapacitating actual challenges (Ebert, 2010). Both heavenly show — also a couple of wriggle ’n’ recoil minutes — from the conceivably smashing actual difficulties of specific professions, and make the majority of the resultant age-accomplishment stress. Aronofsky favours individual space-attacking over-the-shoulder points in the two movies, which are mostly recorded handheld with a solitary camera. Also, both are, somewhat, an investigation of a grin, with the chief moving back from Mickey Rourke’s battered banks and into the virgin landscape of Portman’s level, verdant slopes.

To be sure, Aronofsky is rehashing a portion of similar stunts as Martin Scorsese did with Casino and GoodFellas, yet not to the degree that Scorsese did with Casino and GoodFellas. Also, it’s not as though he’s endeavouring to rethink himself as a stripped-down semi-documentarian. The mind singing agony that went through his presentation, Pi, is available in Black Swan, as are shades of The Fountain in its frequenting polymorphic scenes. Hugh Jackman’s conquistador grew blossoms disastrously there; here, Portman emits plumes (Edelstein, 2010). Dark Swan has demonstrated unpalatable to numerous commentators, who are regularly put off by both the commonality of its behind-the-stage competition rhythms and the thick laying on of doppelgänger trickeries. With its under-the-counter exchange body frightfulness — the bone-breaking certainties deceptively displaced by seemingly over-strict fantasies of toes intertwining through webbed fowl feet and dim down hitting through muscle — Not just does Portman’s Nina, who plays Tchaikovsky’s innocent princess Odette, consider herself to be an unearthly Odile, yet the differentiation among her and the outwardly indistinguishable Lily (Mila Kunis) — also known as the new, trying upstart — and Beth (Winona Ryder) — the more seasoned, usurped prima ballet performer — are constantly obscured (Teodoro, 2010). Dark Swan, as either David Cronenberg’s or Brian De Palma’s best work (the two of which this film owes an obligation to), isn’t for everybody. Also, it’s a long way from great; Ryder’s ineffectively mascara-ed eyes hit a low note, and the content — generally on account of Vincent Cassel’s swaggering, Machiavellian chief — appears to pester about the White/Black Swan polarity. However, it doesn’t prevent it from being another amazing contribution from one of America’s most encouraging producers. Aronofsky figures out how to ship us from the moist claustrophobia of latrine work areas and changing rooms to the sheer, light-washed euphoria of the stage for certain shocking visual twists (Propes, 2010). He shots artful dance a similar way Martin Scorsese shot enclosing Raging Bull: very close, with constrained vicinity that you’d think would undermine its elegance, however as a general rule fortifies it, getting every last jerk, squeak, and battle.

Dark Swan, similar to The Wrestler (once more), shows Aronofsky’s capability to evoke vocation best exhibitions from lead stars, for this situation, Portman. It’s not simply the simplicity with which she moves like a prepared artist. In the first place, the position will in general need, even more, a strict, actual stretch than a figurative one — Portman has consistently preferred White Swan over Black Swan (Teodoro, 2010). Nonetheless, as Nina’s psychological state disintegrates, we see Portman at her generally uncertain and savage, frostily fragile and tastelessly pliable (and we’re not simply discussing her simulated intercourse with Kunis), before cresting at the film’s decision with a crude, appealing gem of a score. Is anything but a spoiler to say that, similar to The Wrestler (once more), the film closes with an awakening round of praise. Furthermore, similar to Rourke’s last bow in that film, it couldn’t be all the more enthusiastically fitting here.

Dark Swan is deliberately absurd, and a portion of the impacts are exaggerated, yet it’s luxuriously, exotically engaging, and something is interesting about watching Portman surrender to the frenzy and watch her face change into a ghastliness veil like a horrible adaptation of Maria Callas. It’s exciting, somewhat crazy, and now and then alarming. “Dark Swan,” coordinated by Darren Aronofsky, is a max speed drama told with energetic power, sublimely and obscurely silly. It rotates around Natalie Portman’s bold work, which looks like the battle among great and evil in Tchaikovsky’s artful dance “Swan Lake.” It’s one thing to lose yourself in your craft. The ballet dancer played by Natalie Portman goes crazy. Traditional expressive dance fits overabundance inside and out. Excellent motions, the sensation of triumph over actuality, and even the force of gravity are all important for fine art (Goldberg, 2010). Regardless, it requires long periods of exacting hair-splitting from its specialists, the kind of physical and passionate moulding that outweighs regular daily existence. Nina Sayers, Portman’s character, is devoured by this pressure among ideal and certainty. A summarizing is standard in numerous artful dance-based dramatizations, and it generally happens in the third demonstration. The film “Dark Swan” is dazzling. A large number of the music’s and life’s topics, the entirety of the story’s and artful dance’s similitudes, the entirety of the disarray among actuality and fantasy meet up in an excellent elation of transcending love (Bradshaw, 2011). There’s just a single bearing this can lead us, and it does. I wouldn’t burn through an excessive amount of time attempting to discover what occurs practically speaking if I was you. Numerous individuals have hesitations about the closure of “The Red Shoes.” They weren’t right, so they did it in any case.

It is, most importantly, another illustration of that old classification, the lady’s film. Nina’s interests are seen as curbed and illegal, and her accomplishments are depicted as wins of a barbaric and unsafe artistic expression, for which she is properly rebuffed. Joan Crawford gave her anything to play her. Nina has a female adversary, yet it’s not her hot, aspiring enemy Lily (Mila Kunis), yet rather her change personality. Indeed, “Dark Swan” is the most current illustration of the “wow, there’s two of her!” gadget, authored by film pundit Jeanine Basinger. Nina makes her inside enemy of Nina. Also, the adjusted self-image competitions and isolated conscience dreams of “Dark Swan” are inseparably connected to “Swan Lake’s” acceptable terrible, white-dark, dynamic latent Odette-Odile champions. Nina is first informed that she can’t be both the white and dark swan. In any case, the measure of clashing champions she contains gets perplexing sooner or later (Dargin, 2010). Nina additionally gets a brief look at her enemy of Nina in the mirror. For quite a long time, expressive dance has been worried by mirrors, and not simply in words. Artists invest more energy before the mirror than before a crowd of people, and it is in the mirror that they see both the best pictures of themselves they desire to present to the general population and their imperfections. Even though “Dark Swan” has all the earmarks of being unfriendly to artful dance, I don’t trust it is. Its actual objective, far more than that of such countless other ladies’ movies, is to recommend that a lady’s actual satisfaction comes from her parts as (hetero) darling, spouse, and mother and that Nina’s most noteworthy imaginative accomplishments won’t ever make up for her penances (Teodoro, 2010). Artful dance, as indicated by the “Dark Swan” point of view, is an undesirable fine art wherein ladies deny such countless regular aspects of womanhood.

References

Bradshaw, P. 2011. Black Swan — Review. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jan/20/black-swan-review

Dargin, M. 2010. On Point, On Top, In pain. The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/movies/03black.html

Ebert R. 2010. She became perfect in every area except life. Roger Ebert. Available at: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/black-swan-2010

Edelstein, D. 2010. ‘Black Swan.: A largely empty sensation. NPR. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2010/12/03/131730846/-black-swan-a-largely-empty-sensation

Goldberg, M. 2010. Black Swan Review. Collider. Available at: https://collider.com/black-swan-movie-review-darren-aronofsky-natalie-portman/

Jolin, D. 2011. Black Swan Review. Empire online. Available at: https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/black-swan-review/

Macaulay, A. 2011. The many faces of ‘Black Swan’ Deconstructed. The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/arts/dance/10swan.html

Propes, R. 2010. “Black Swan” Review. The independent Critic. Available at: https://theindependentcritic.com/black_swan

Teodoro, J. 2010. Review: Black Swan. Film Comment. Available at: https://www.filmcomment.com/article/black-swan/

--

--