Black Swan Analysis

Even more difficult than defining art is coming to an agreement of what constitutes art. Along this extensive history of debate came the consideration of whether film is art. Films were not considered an art form and had not been seriously debated until film theorist Rudolf Arnheim challenged what art could be with his theory. Arnheim, who claims that the more a film differs from reality the more it should be considered art, would certainly argue that a film like Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010) is art in that it significantly displaces the viewer from their lived reality. He rejects the “assertion that film is nothing but the feeble mechanical reproduction of real life” (“Film Theory and Criticism” 228), instead postulating that human perspective and choices should be involved in the process of making a film to meaningfully shape elements of our lived experience. In Black Swan, director Darren Aronofsky uses multiple tools and aspects of the medium of film to create a surreal narrative. The film Black Swan qualifies as art by Rudolf Arnheim’s standards because of the ways that the viewers’ experience of the film differs from our experience of reality.

Arnheim’s body of theory suggests that the necessity of human intervention to implement plot, tropes, and culturally legible symbols raises a film to a higher level than a mere copy of reality, and that this interpretation and expression of meaning is “a question of feeling” or intuition on the part of the filmmaker. (“Film Theory and Criticism” 283) One consequence of effective directorial intervention is that differences in speed, stops and starts, and what would otherwise be jarring gaps in continuity can be accepted by viewers, because if the essentials of reality are present, th...

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... art as removal from reality, controlled by the filmmakers’ choices which adds the element of human interpretation Arnheim finds so important.

Even aside from the ambiguity of what is real within the text of the film, Black Swan clearly presents imagery that goes beyond what is seen and experienced in our world. Based on Arnheim’s perspective, Black Swan is art because it experiments with the forms of color, sound, framing, and with editing of time and space. Application of his theories illuminates the ways in which these aspects of film effect viewers’ process of making sense of reality, and how that interpretive process can be intentionally altered. In this respect, any filmmaker who uses film’s formal elements to create and effectively communicate meaning over and above simply conveying what was in front of the camera at the time can be said to be creating art.