Darren Aronofsky –

The greatest director of his generation?

Part 1 – Pi (1998)

Young indie filmmakers are told to be daring and make films Hollywood would never consider producing. Aronofsky directed Pi in 1998, and in doing so, literally made a film no one had ever seen before. A grainy, high-contrast black and white, cyberpunk, mathematics thriller. A what? Well, I’ll get to that. Aronofsky won best director at Sundance for the film and many wondered if he would buckle under the hype surrounding his career. Almost twelve years later his fifth film Black Swan opens to a limited release in December. In that twelve years Aronofsky has risen to be one of the most uncompromising and polarizing filmmakers of the past decade.

His films Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler are considered masterpieces and The Fountain his only folly. But is it really? Frequently working with director of photography Mattew Libatique and composer Clint Mansell Aronofsky has created a body of work that I consider the best of the past decade. For The Wrestler he became only the third American to ever receive a Golden Lion, which is considered one of the most prestigious awards in filmmaking. (Sofia Coppola has since won a GL as well for Somewhere) I will quickly be discussing all his movies, why they’re awesome, and why he is questionably the greatest director of his generation.

The title greatest of his generation is just viral bait. How do I know what his generation is? Genre? Age? The period he got famous? Who knows? Instead, I’ll argue for why his movies are great, not why other director’s movies are not. Keep in mind I’m not just performing fandom fellatio on Aronofsky, but instead, trying to encourage everyone who reads this to watch his movies and consider their impact and value.

Shot from Tetsuo: The Iron Man, one of many influences.

Neuromancer, Akira, Testuo – The Iron Man, Sin City, Repulsion. Who the hell would have thought all those would mix into a sixty thousand dollar, independent film? In the mid-nineties Aronofksy was a twenty-nine year old American Film Institute graduate who was a promising talent, but needed to make a feature film. Like I said before, there are daring independent films and then downright ludicrous ones. Aronofsky set out to make a cyberpunk film about math, obsession, and madness. Pi is all about math, but like all of Aronofsky’s films that is only what simmers on the surface. Deeper boils the theme shared by all Aronofsky’s films: obsession. Pi follows Max, a genius mathematician, as he delves deeper into his mind in order to discover a mysterious number that makes order of the universe.

Black and white? Hell yeah!

It would be fruitless to delve too deep into the mathematical ideas explored in Pi. The science is not unlike that of Inception in that Aronofsky makes the audience believe in the logic and scientific possibility of the impossible. Regardless, what strikes viewers first is the fact the film is black and white. Most people would say, “yuck, a black and white film. It is all grainy and looks like shit.” Well, yes. It is black and white. Looks like shit? Well, that is up to you to decide.

Max at his computer called "Euclid".

Aronofsky and his director of photography Matthew Libatique were apprehensive about making a color 16mm film, instead, they went with a black and white stock that was more expensive than color film and took up a majority of the film’s budget. Aronofsky said this when asked why he decided to go black and white transversal and the limitations of having such a small budget:

For instance, we could only afford 16mm film, but color 16mm looks like shit no matter what you do with it. So, my cinematographer and I decided to make as stylized a film as we could with black and white. We didn’t want to make a gray film like Clerks. We wanted to make a black and white film, so we chose b/w reversal film. It’s hard to buy, it’s hard to expose and it’s hard to process, but if you nail it, it’s gorgeous. ¹

An example of the stark black and white film stock.

What a gutsy decision. When Aronofsky mentions that transferal is a hard film to expose, it is an understatement. When exposing this type of film the DP must nail the f-stop perfectly, if not, the film is really grainy, underexposed, muddy, and shitty looking. To be honest, the exposure wasn’t always nailed. Many shots are almost unwatchable, but for some reason it works. I wonder if Pi would have worked as a color film. There is just something to the highly stylized, almost art-on-the-wall quality to some of the shots. Moreover, the muddy, underexposed look works sometimes. Pete Townshend, the gutiarist for The Who, was the first to use feedback as an artistic tool – sometimes poor sound, or in Pi’s case, unpolished visuals, adds veracity and a grittiness to the art.

Film language and why Aronofsky makes it not suck to talk about

Film language is a term that makes anyone who has taken a film course cringe. Most of the time teachers throw up an archaic movie like Citizen Kane and break it down: Mise-en-scene. Mise-en-shot. Deep-focus. Continuity. Why this shot? Why that shot? Ugh, makes my stomach sick just thinking about it. Countless students have been lost this way. Finally a director came along that made these things exciting, not just academic. Aronofsky’s style has been called pretentious, but I think he might have the most exciting cinematic technique in modern filmmaking. Almost every shot in Pi was premeditated to be subjective and descriptive of Max’s inner psyche. This might be the genius of the film.

Innovative rigs were used in order to represent Max’s genius/madness. The most obvious of which is the Snorricam. First used in Mean Streets, Aronofsky dumps the typical use of the rig (to show people drunk) and instead uses it to add intimacy, disorientation, and immediacy to Max’s mental state. Also used frequently is the shaky-camera and I’m not talking cinema-verite style either. When Max’s headaches occur, the camera shakes rapidly, and with the addition of a perfect sound effect, the audience is given a nauseating interpretation of Max’s pain. And, of course, Aronofsky’s famous hip-hop editing, which is a rapid series of shots to show a montage of actions. Aronofsky certainly didn’t invent the style, Scorsese was using it back in After Hours, but Aronofsky’s perfect execution of the technique popularized it in cinema. The camera rapidly edits between Max locking and unlocking his doors, taking drugs, and doing other tasks. The clip below highlights almost all of them:

3 Min. Section of PI (1998) from Kristian Tumangan on Vimeo.

Damn original

Moreover, Pi hit Sundance and Aronofsky walked away with the Best Director award and a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize. I still read about filmmakers who reference Pi as the pinnacle of originality and daring execution. Ramin Bahrani, director of the great film Goodbye Solo, said this about Pi last year in a discussion with Roger Ebert on the state of indie movies:

I’m starting to realize that no matter if they say film is dying–no matter if they’re telling me you have to do this, you have to do that–I think they’re wrong. I think the more you risk, the better. Did you like the Darren Aronofsky film, ‘Pi?’ Because it risked everything. What the hell is it? I mean, who came up with this thing? The more you risk the better.²

This highlights the greatness of Pi to me. It isn’t necessary the best film of all time, but it seems to exist only in the time and space that Aronofsky created for it. A movie that was gutsy and payed off. There were no guarantees Aronofsky would ever have a career, let alone get a second shot, if Pi bombed. He banked his life on an absurd premise. It is the audacity of Pi that makes it endure.

1http://aronofksy.tripod.com/interview15.html

2http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/03/the_new_great_american_directo.html

Part 2 – Requiem for a Dream coming soon…