Black Swan is a film about the production
of swan lake. The movie follows Nina a dancer at the New York Ballet City
Company as she is cast in the titular role of the black swan in the company’s
production of Swan Lake. I clocked what the plot was going to be pretty early
on in the film. Not only as the audience do, we see the main character portray
the swan queen in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake buy the film itself plays out like
the ballet. It documents her decent into a living hell as she is cast as in the
main role of swan queen.
Her mother smothers her treating her like a
child as well and holding her back developmentally and physically. She is
living vicariously through her daughter, having had to give up her own career
as a ballet dancer to raise her. When Nina gets the role of Swan Queen we see
her grow up and break free from her mother but in doing so she loses her
sanity. It touches briefly on eating disorders. But focuses mainly on the
characters spiralling hallucinations. Mirrors are used as a storytelling device
to represent how she sees herself as well as showing the white/black swan
mirror image.
I liked how they dealt with the hallucinations. They
use a techniques that I've seen before mostly in horror films but it's used to
make the audience feel as afraid as the main character is feeling because it's
from their perspective so you don't know whether what you're seeing is real
until the character realises that it's not real and so it's another way of
putting the audience in the characters shoes and making them more relatable.
The film also looks briefly at harassment. The Nina’s
boss Thomas Leroy or The Gentleman creates a power dynamic between the two.
She feels grateful to him for giving her the role when he could've given it to
someone else. He's made her feel dependent on him. This film came out in 2010.
9 years before the Me2 movement. Why did nobody question or challenge his
actions then? Why is this still relevant 9 years later?
I have chosen to study mental health in ballet
because on the surface I did ballet for 2 years when I was about 14. I stopped
doing it I had a lot going on in school, but also, I found that the ballet
school environment wasn't healthy for me especially at that time in my life.
There was a lot of pressure to look and act a certain way which just wasn't me.
I found that I was changing myself to fit what others wanted and expected. It
was rough.
Animation and ballet have the same sort of
troubles. In Ballet you only see the final performance but not the days, weeks
and months of rehearsing. The years of ruthless training and rejection.
Choreographing the dance, practising the dance practising the dance moves,
strength training especially for boys. Boys in ballet have it especially rough
because if the social stigma. Some people don't make the cut, they'll find the
smallest most seemingly insignificant thing about your body and that'll be why
you can't do it. Your too tall, too small, that slight curve in your spine,
your left knee is slightly higher up than your right and on and on. In
animation the audience only sees the final animation, but they don't see the hundreds
of hours that have gone into making it. The years of practising drawing,
studying acting, studying anatomy and learning cinematography then the stress
of putting yourself through art school so that you can learn the skills needed
to animate well. It takes it’s toll on you physically, eye strain, repetitive
strain injury, carpal tunnel, bad back. The social isolation and long hours.
Then the rejections and setbacks. Then some people assume that animation is for
children and you are told that you should get a 'real job'.
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