Black Swan or On How To Turn a Dream Into a Nightmare

Abstract

Horror films have recently regained an audience. The critical and commercial success of Aronofsky’s Black Swan lends itself to an analysis of its aesthetic and narrative mechanisms, as well as of the strategies employed to construct its characters and the cinematic language of this genre. The American director offers a cocktail of influences: nineteenth-century literature and ballet, Freudian theories, and lessons from the great masters of the cinematic art. It also takes up the tradition of the doppelgänger, which originated in the Scandinavian sagas and achieved its greatest splendour in nineteenth-century European art. Finally, although it has been labelled an independent film, it exhibits some characteristics of the hypermodern age, in which new technologies constitute key instruments in the development of a hyperbolic aesthetic.