A Study in Black Intro Part I

“Once you get into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.” - Hunter S. Thompson. What does it mean to have an obsession? One filmmaker knows how to convey a feeling of obsession like no other; in fact obsession is the main thread of continuity in his movies. This filmmaker is Darren Aronofsky. A line from Aronofsky’s breakthrough feature Pi (1998) is an ironic gesture toward his filmmaking, “When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere.” Who is Darren Aronofsky? In this introduction I will articulate whom Darren Aronofsky is, i.e. his background and information on how he broke into the film industry with his major breakthrough film Pi. Darren Aronofsky was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 12th 1969. He is the son of Charlotte and Abraham Aronofsky, both public school teachers who are Conservative Jews. Aronofsky grew up in the ‘Borough's’ Manhattan Beach neighborhood, Aronofsky says; "I was raised culturally Jewish, but there was very little spiritual attendance in temple. It was a cultural thing—celebrating the holidays, knowing where you came from, knowing your history, having respect for what your people have been through." He graduated from Edward R. Murrow High School. Aronofsky clearly from a young age adapted a deep interest into his surroundings, Patti; his only sister attended a professional ballet school through high school, (the beginning interest behind Black Swan). His parents would also often take him to Broadway theater performances, which added another spark to his interest in ‘show business.’ After all, there’s no business like show business! In 1985, Aronofsky trained as a field biologist with The School for Field Studies in Kenya and then in Alaska in 1986. He was fascinated by ungulates and attended school in Kenya to pursue this interest. Aronofsky later said, "The School for Field Studies changed the way I perceived the world.” Aronofsky's interest in the outdoors led him to backpacking his way throughout Europe and the Middle East. In 1987 he entered Harvard University, he graduated in 1991 where he majored in social anthropology and studied filmmaking. After befriending Dan Schrecker an aspiring animator, during his time at Harvard Aronofsky became seriously interested in film. He also met Sean Gullette at Harvard, who went on to star in Aronofsky's first film, Pi (1998). His other cinematic influences included Terry Gilliam, Shinya Tsukamoto, Bill Cosby, Hubert Selby, Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, Jr. Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch. In 1992 Aronofsky received his MFA degree in directing from the American Film Institute (AFI) Conservatory, where his classmates included Doug Ellin, Scott Silver, and Mark Waters. Aronofsky's senior thesis short film Supermarket Sweep (1991) won several film awards and went on to become a National Student Academy Award finalist. His next two shorts after that was the 1993 movie "Protozoa" (which surprisingly co-starred Lucy Liu), and the 1994 movie "No Time", which is also known by its alternative title, "No Info on IMDB about this movie". From early in his career Aronofsky developed his “style” in filmmaking. Today he is often referred to as an ‘auteur’, what exactly is an auteur? 1 An auteur is someone that has a differentiating style, almost instantly recognizable and which creates a film in which he/she expresses his/her personality. What’s common throughout the Aronofsky filmography that makes his work so individually striking? Firstly his main characters, 2From the beginning of his career, Aronofsky`s protagonist has an obsessive pursuit of ideas that later on leads to severely self-destructive behavior. Extreme paranoia, hallucinations, and social anxiety disorder are the main characteristics of the protagonist. 3 Stylistically, his films always have a very unique blend of realism and formalism that does not seem to favor one style over the other. He not only direct but writes his films as well, which further enables the audience to feel his distinctive presence. His writing and his blend of realism and formalism are a big part of what forms his auteur-like style, but nothing in his body of work stands out as much or is as unique to him as the continuous illustration of obsession throughout his films even though they have very dissimilar plot lines. Clearly Aronofsky is a man of obsession, his style of filmmaking and themes are evidence to his fixation toward his craft. Although Aronofsky has done several works outside of his main feature films, this study specifically examines the films that Darren Aronofsky has directed, i.e. Pi (1998), Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Fountain (2006), The Wrestler (2008), Black Swan (2010) and Noah 1 http://danielaiurascurgu.blogspot.ie/2012/03/what-makes-auteur.html 2 http://danielaiurascurgu.blogspot.ie/2012/03/what-makes-auteur.html 3 http://ashleydionne.tripod.com/aronofsky.htm (2014). To examine Aronofsky’s films, the best place to begin is his beginning, not with his earlier works such as Fortune Cookie (1991), Supermarket Sweep (1991) or No Time (1994), but with his breakthrough film, i.e. the beginning of the ‘obsession reign,’ Pi (1998). Pi was shot in November 1997; the film’s budget was financed entirely from $100 donations from Aronofsky’s friends and family. In return, he promised to pay each back $150 if the film made money, and they would at least get screen credit if the film lost money. While visiting Israel as a youth Aronofsky spent several days in an Orthodox Yeshiva, an experience that later played it’s part in Pi. Aronofsky premiered Pi at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, where he won the Best Director award. The film itself was nominated for a Special Jury Award. Pi, also titled π, is Aronofsky’s only full feature in black and white. It’s also conceivably his maddest of plot lines. The story is of Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) a mathematician obsessed with finding numerical patterns. Pi is perhaps the least subtle in dealing with the unforgiving plight of obsession within the early works of Aronofsky. Following neurotic time analyzing the stock market for patterns, Max ascends into deeper uncontrollable obsession in his search for the pattern within Pi. It is of his belief that everything can be explained by mathematics, and by discovering the pattern within everything. But by specifically discovering the pattern in Pi, it will enable him to answer any question and understand any pattern found in the universe. It began as more of an occupational hobby, slightly less dark, light enough that Max starts to discuss his search for patterns with a man he meets at a coffee shop that he frequents on a daily basis, Max meets Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman), a Hasidic Jew who coincidentally does mathematical research on the Torah. Lenny demonstrates to Max some simple Gematria, the correspondence of the Hebrew alphabet to numbers, and describes how some individuals believe that the Torah is a thread of numbers that form a code sent by God. When some of the number concepts Lenny discusses are similar to other mathematical concepts (the Fibonacci sequence), Max takes an interest. Agents of a Wall Street firm who are interested in his work also mysteriously meet Max. One of the agents, Marcy Dawson, offers Max a classified computer chip called "Ming Mecca" in exchange for the results of his work, which Max eventually accepts. Throughout the film Max suffers from severe migraines, making him at time less functional, however Max refuses to stop his pursuit for patterns. As the narrative progresses so does everything else, Max’s migraines intensity increase and the frequency of his hobby becomes his life’s meaning, an obsession. With the worsening of his migraines Max takes more and more of his medication, through the taking of this medication we can see the early stage of Aronofsky’s rapid editing drug sequence’s so famously seen in Requiem for a Dream (2000). Sol pleads for Max to stop, but the idea itself that there is no pattern only makes Max more determined to find it. Much like Aronofsky’s lead characters or as I call them ‘destructive dreamers,’ Max goes into a form of isolation, excluding himself from the public but mainly from friends and neighbors, feeling only apathy for anything but finding the pattern. He eventually ascends into complete chaos and insanity, ending in… well this image from Pi speaks for itself. Stylistically, all of Aronofsky’s films exploit a very inimitable blend of ‘realistic’ and ‘formalistic’ devices, which are another characteristic, that ensures his place as an auteur director. Although editing and the camera movement in Pi is objectively realistic in that it is mainly used for continuity, Aronofsky’s use of close-ups are purely to emphasis the pressure ‘coming down’ on Max and the filthiness of his work environment, this is formalistic. Aronofsky shot Pi in black and white to demand attention to the fact that Max is depressed, alone and only living for what he dreams to discover. Disregarding to use of color and the use his use of Max’s voiceover narration is another of Aronofsky’s formalistic devices. In the beginning of the film the narration is used when Max tells about how as a child his eyes were harmed by starring at the sun. This voiceover is repeated times throughout the film several times, but beyond it, no other voiceover narration is used. 4 The story emphasizes Max’s thirst for knowledge and understanding, because although his mother told him not to look at the sun, she never told him why.

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