(Р)эволюция в фильмах: «Чёрный лебедь»

(R)evolution in Film: Black Swan

Female artists are generally incensed by the portrayal of female sexuality in Black Swan. Looking at the film through the conventional feminist lens, they are asking: "Why does a woman still need to use her sexuality to move ahead in her career?"

This refers to the dancer Nina, played by the brilliant Natalie Portman, who is goaded by the ballet director (Vincent Cassel) into the dark realms of her psyche in order to embody the Black Swan in his remaking of Swan Lake, as a struggle between the Dioynissian vs. Apollonian creative tension that births great art.

Such a haunting and lusciously beautiful film instills an aesthetic arising from the tension between the opposites -- perfection and its dark mirror of destruction and decay -- was a welcome relief for me, considering my decade of scouring under artists' beds, in their closets and waste baskets for compelling imagery penetrating into the depths of the female psyche.

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With the art world system so engorged over the past twenty years -- participants busting structures at their seams -- there seems to be some communal agreement to tamp down the primordial force that has driven art through the ages in order to, well, keep the order!

Classical ballet provides the perfect stage for a new birth, as it upholds as an aesthetic the last bastion of the patriarchy in the arts, with its strict demarcation of gender roles -- male dancers serving as support/suitors to prima ballerinas in toe shoes -- and hierarchy revealed in Nina's struggle to break free from the corps and brand herself as an artist.

The understanding that exists at the film's core, that a new order can only arise from chaos and female sexuality is the primordial force of transformation propelling beyond the ego self to the universal Self -- is either deeply repressed or simply ignored, for the most part, in the contemporary art world.

Yet, I had a welcome request for an interview from an LA style maker who is more eclectic with her mix of art, style and spirituality than ever admitted in the New York art world; in investigating Marie Bargas' website, www.stylecoven.com and discovering the Black Swan style, I say hurrah for the freedom existing outside the art world, where Marie's eclectic mix of pagan spirituality and freedom in fashion celebrates a new luxurious aesthetic of the dark feminine.