With BLACK SWAN, the Harvard-educated Aronofsky ascends the ladder of high art, a change in direction from his prior, obdurately blue-collar outings: the wildly successful THE WRESTLER, and the druggy and disturbing REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. Building on the framework of the 19th-century ballet masterpiece “Swan Lake” and adding a maelstrom of impressive cinematic bells and whistles, Aronofsky examines no less profound a subject than the dual nature of women. In the process, he resuscitates that most spurned of Hollywood genres, the woman’s film.

The pointe-shoe sequence serves a double purpose. It lures the much-desired male demographic, which may have been dragged to the theater. But by disassociating the foot from its body, Aronofsky signals his defiance of conventional dance-cinematography wisdom: that the medium shot makes for the most felicitous marriage of dance and film. (Decades of experimentation by the likes of Michael Powell, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Jack Cole have proved that the body in full view renders choreography coherent.) Disembodied arms, legs, torsos, and heads–often filmed in close-up–make BLACK SWAN perhaps not a great dance movie, but a visually powerful tour-de-force.

BLACK SWAN tells the story of Nina (Portman), a young dancer who craves ballet’s great dual role played by one woman, Odette/Odile. Nina, we are told, is a natural white swan, not because her dancing is particularly lyrical or ethereal, but because she’s still a girl–a virgin. Stuffed animals decorate her pink bedroom in the claustrophobic apartment she shares with her overbearing mother, a failed ballerina (Barbara Hershey). Her ballet master, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel, who steals a woman’s movie from four women) warns Nina sternly that to truly understand and therefore properly dance the black swan role, she’d better fast-track her id.

Repeatedly urged by the demanding Leroy to “Let it go!” (a real mission impossible considering the technical demands of dancing Odile), the browbeaten Nina applies herself assiduously to her own sexual liberation. Toward this end, the plucky Portman submits to a series of edgy and vivid sexual scenes with characteristic courage. Other than these moments of obvious pleasure, Portman spends the movie looking worried and unhappy. Is it naive to wonder why we never see Nina experience the joy of movement?

Winona Ryder — one of the most vivacious actresses of her generation — appears first in a marvelous snippet, lasting only seconds, that would make Joan Crawford proud. She rips up her dressing room, then strides by the younger Nina barking “What!?” Ryder’s pitch-perfect delivery of this one word leaves us wanting more, but soon she’s tied down in a hospital bed, black and blue and going mad. But that’s standard Hollywood treatment for smart women. Another fresh and compelling presence is Mila Kunis, playing Lily, Nina’s undermining rival. The lesson she has to offer Nina is to never trust another woman. But in a clever way, this reflects the ballet.

Aronofsky and his screenwriters Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin reduce the Petipa/Tchaikovsky classic in key ways, primarily by recasting it as a virgin-vs-whore story. Sex forms the dividing line between the two swans in the film’s view. In the ballet, Odile, the black swan, is aggressive, even sexually so. But she’s also smart, seductive, strategic. Aronofsky, who led Mickey Rourke to an Oscar nomination by showing the brie-eating side of a macho guy, fails to lend Portman the same dimensionality in her character.

Another way Aronofsky reinterprets his source material is in BLACK SWAN’s denouement. In the ballet, Odette and her lover Siegfried die together, seeking a transcendent place where boy-on-swan love can exist. By contrast, Portman’s Nina bears the film’s staggering conflicts internally, and moves toward her destiny alone. The loneliness of this, and the shattering view of Nina’s broken, thwarted relationships, say much about how society (and romantic love) has changed since 1877 when “Swan Lake” had its debut.

BLACK SWAN bourrées into the ether at a moment of particular vulnerability in the dance world. With each generation further removed from the aristocratic conventions of 19th-century European classicism, troupes are scrambling to maintain relevance–-and funding. The teenagers who fill the ranks of “Swan Lake”’s corps de ballet wouldn’t know a peasant from a pheasant, let alone a swan.

Aronofsky complained in interviews about the cloistered world of ballet not giving him access. And despite a roster of ballet consultants in his film’s credits, cinema’s latest wunderkind has his way with this beautiful art form, applying high-tech virtuosity for his own agenda. He tramples on classical ballet’s delicate offerings — its purity, its way of connecting us to the past, and its uplifting spirituality. I’ll stick to last year’s gorgeous LA DANSE in which the 80-year old purveyor of rigorous documentaries, Frederick Wiseman, comes out of the closet as a balletomane of rapturous proportion.

Read this story on the AFI blogpost. Read it on The Huffington Post.

_{photo credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures, Niko Tavernise}

Months later, I saw Wiseman’s “Meat” at REDCAT. Amazing.

Mr. Wiseman will be honored with a lifetime achievement award from Loyola Marymount College’s School of Film and Television. He also gives a talk at LMU’s West Los Angeles campus on Friday October 15 at 2:30 pm.

Fred Wiseman “Visual Literacy” talk | October 15

They’re Paris Opera Ballet dancers hoofing it in Rudolph Nureyev’s version of Tchaikowsky’s “Casse-Noisette” or “The Nutcracker.”

It’s my favorite scene in the movie. You gotta see these girls thumping the wood floor with their pointe shoes, their coaches cracking the whip and hurling verbal cues above the clatter. It’s just unbelievable. Think of the cattle herding scene in Howard Hawks’ “Red River.”

But guess what — The Nutcracker doesn’t always look this good. In fact, more often it looks like this.

I write in this Friday’s Los Angeles Times about a stalwart community ballet troupe that provides a Nutcracker alternative: “The Snow Queen,” based on the Hans Christian Andersen fable about a bad-spell-inducing mirror.  Read it and enjoy!

Film is now playing at Laemmle Theaters in Beverly Hills, Pasadena and Encino.

Read the interview with director Frederick Wiseman.

Update: Sorry, no more discount coupons. This once in a lifetime opportunity has expired! Maybe in your next lifetime you can enjoy it again.

“Dance is the creation of something absolutely beautiful,” he says. “Yet it’s not a fixed form. It’s ephemeral. It’s evanescent.”

“I’m no expert,” he says, “But I go to everything. I’ve attended New York City Ballet and ABT for decades, and living in Paris for the past eight years I never miss Paris Opera Ballet performances. I love the work of William Forsythe, Blanca Lee, and Anjelin Preljocaj,” his personal laundry list of the world’s top contemporary ballet choreographers belying his modest claim of being a dance hobbyist.

Wiseman’s 37^th film, “La Danse,” about Paris Opera Ballet, caps a long and distinguished career as the dean of the most uncompromising form of documentary filmmaking, direct cinema. Inserting the viewer into an idiosyncratic institution, Wiseman slowly reveals his subject, scrupulously adhering to a neutral, observational point of view. With his steady camera and artful shaping of hundreds of hours of film footage, he achieves his effects without the external devices of voice-over, caption, or archival footage.

“La Danse” displays the splendid artists of the French ballet troupe now considered the finest in the world. It adopts a traditional narrative arc, opening with studio rehearsal sessions in which Europe’s top choreographers impart their art to unutterably fine dancers. It then details the meticulous back-stage craft, including the artisans who create ballet costumes, and the considerable challenges of Brigitte Lefèvre, artistic director of a company judged for well over one hundred years to be unmanageable. For a balletomane, this is a guided tour of paradise.

The film has its controversies. It’s extremely long – at 158 minutes perhaps too much ballet to absorb in one viewing. And while he showcases both film and dance at their highest level, Wiseman’s choices – notably, to not identify performers, choreographers, or talking heads – initially chafe, and seem to serve film methodology at the expense of dance.

Wiseman disagrees: “I thought about it a lot. I decided that people in the know do not need data. Those who aren’t knowledgeable won’t be greatly aided by information. I want people to simply enjoy what the film is about. The information is all in the credits, and I run them slowly so people can get it there.” What ultimately drove his decision, says Wiseman, is his belief that captioning “would destroy the picture.”

And what a picture. Shooting some of the most beautiful creatures on earth from fresh and visually alluring camera angles, including an overhead perch, Wiseman’s objective eye spills over with rapture for the art form.

“I have enormous respect for dancers and their discipline,” he says. “Plus, all my films are about work. Dancers start working young, at six or seven years old, and their careers are over by 40. They take class in the morning, rehearse in the afternoon, and perform at night. This goes on all year round, year in and year out.”

The film reflects the crushing load of labor-intensive work involved in transferring ballet ephemera from generation to generation. Wiseman notes that one of the Paris Opera Ballet’s strengths as an institution is that retired ballet stars—called étoiles in French—remain in the organization to coach the next crop of youngsters.

Wiseman photographs the amazing coaching sessions, several located in studios tucked beneath the high-reaching cupola windows of Palais Garnier, Paris’s beloved Beaux-Arts opera house. Filming in an environment rife with mirrors, Wiseman admits with a laugh, “was a horror show,” but he artfully hides his camera from sight. By using the mirror well, he adds, “I could include both the dancers and their coaches in one frame.”

Into a roster of hardcore social documentaries like “High School” (1968), “Hospital” (1970), “Welfare” (1975), ”Public Housing” (1997), and “State Legislature” (2007), Wiseman has interpolated films about the creative process, including his first ballet film, “Ballet” (1995) about American Ballet Theater and “La Comédie-Française” (1996).

When asked who in the art world works as hard as dancers, his simple reply is, “me.”

But something in dance seizes his imagination: “Dance makes you question what our own transience represents. There’s a ricochet effect between the exquisite form captured in choreography and the human experience from which movement is derived. Dance makes me think about ordinary life differently.”

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You can read more on this film in an article co-authored with Doug Cummings on the AFI film festival blogsite.

“La Danse” opens at Laemmle Theaters in Beverly Hills, Encino and Pasadena on November 20. It screens at AFIFEST on October 31.