As we all know, movies, in a sense, can be seen as the description and sharing of characters’ thoughts, and audiences can usually get different thoughts and experiences through movies. In daily life, the split of thought and personality is a stage that everyone has experienced. In the state of psychological contradictions and panic and anxiety on things, people will produce contradictions in their hearts and the process of thinking separatism. However, for severe personality and schizophrenia, most people do not have a deep experience, and society, therefore, lack attention to the mental state of schizophrenia. Split in the movie, this theme has become a lot of classic important subjects, taken by the director through the absurd and the vagaries of camera language to show the audience the schizophrenic serious world, cooperate with the actor’s expression language elements and flexible lighting effects to make the audience more profound feel schizophrenic complex and contradictory inside. This paper analyzes the lens language and shooting techniques of Black Swan and A Beautiful Mind, two films on the theme of split personality, thus reflecting their performance skills on the characters’ spiritual world.
Darren Aronofsky’s film shows the audience the most complex part of human psychology, his work is the biggest characteristic of the black swan surreal paragraph is used to change the state of a normal person to a state of extreme, and this characteristic in its script has been fully established, is the basis of the characteristics of the establishment of a solid, the layered presentation of surreal paragraphs is the direct carrier of this characteristic (Sandino. 2013, p. 311). Among them, the most representative scene is the so-called schizophrenic scene. The whole film has a large number of follow-up shots, which can continuously and exhaustively show the movements and expressions of the characters while moving, and depict the world in Nina’s eyes more directly. It is very obvious in the dance. The camera takes turns to shoot with Nina as the centre with multiple shooting techniques. We can not only see Nina’s expression and eyes but also see her wonderful dancing posture and delicate body. In the walk to the dance with perturbation, through Nina’s head can see theatre, probably look cold building, hiding the devil, like the back of black wings tattoo is a symbol of black swans montage, she also can see the poster of Beth, we don’t have to see the expression on her face, completely can understand her heart was very envious. When she was practising dancing alone, the lights dimmed (Chu, et al. 2020, p. 1517). When Nina wanted to turn on the lights with the staff, she used a set of follow-up cameras. Nina walked through the darkness, the light and shadow were motley on her face, and you could see the light flickering and dim in her eyes. After seeing Lily and Thomas having sex, Lily turns to look at her, and Thomas turns into the Dark Lord, breaking down and crying. In this film, the director puts a story about the growth of a normal person into a surreal atmosphere. Through the surreal atmosphere, the normal person is eventually prompted to take on an incredible transformation and finally burst out with great power.
As for the other work, the director portrays the theme of schizophrenia and dual personality from different angles through lens language. “A Beautiful Mind” is a well-known psychological blockbuster, the hero Nas is a typical schizophrenic patient. This paper makes a psychological analysis of Nas from the performance of Nas in the movie and reveals the psychological reasons why Nas suffers from schizophrenia from the perspective of analytical psychology, to help the audience better understand the movie and mental patients. The scene I chose for the split-plot was that Nash automatically rationalized the existence of the three virtual characters, and the evidence brought by his wife when she visited him in the mental hospital could not make him deny the delusion in his heart. What makes him realize that they are fictitious is that he actively realizes that the little girl Kathy is not growing in age, proving that she is fictitious. And his wife was with him at this critical juncture, encouraging him to correct Nash’s thinking with genuine love and people, akin to faith correction. He began to struggle with his disease, to live with it, to live with it for the rest of his life. In the process of shooting, the use of lens language is skilled and ingenious. The film externalizes the conflict and illusion of the characters’ spiritual world, turns the illusory spiritual feeling into a visual and audible image, and enhances the dramatic conflict effect of the story (Rosenstock. 2003, p. 118). Nash from genius to a psychopath, the main conflict lies in the struggle and confusion of the mind, the film materialized him into different images, the combination of fantasy and reality, showing the world in the eyes of a psychopath, quietly bring the visual experience of schizophrenia. The film uses subjective shots many times to show the psychological activities and mental states of the characters after Nash enters the Pentagon. When Lou decodes the code, he uses a rotating camera to show Nash’s thinking reaction when facing abstract numbers. The 360-degree camera rotation brings a sense of dizziness, while the subjective camera directly introduces the audience into the plot and experiences the feelings of the protagonist to enhance the subjective experience.
In conclusion, for schizophrenics, there is a close intersection between fantasy and reality, and it is the confusion between the spiritual world and the real world that prevents them from fully living in reality. From the perspective of the technique of expression, the most important part of the film is to visualize the bizarre spiritual world of the split patients. Through camera rotation, montage symbolism and clever use of lighting, the director creates a strange and strange world in the mind of the patients. Through the above analysis process, from a certain point of view, the films that describe psychological problems need a lot of representation and description of the fantasy world in the lens, so they have similar characteristics with the shooting techniques and scene rendering effect of science fiction or even mythological films to a large extent.
References
- Sandino, AM 2013, ‘On perfection: Pain and arts-making in Aronofsky’s Black Swan’, Journal of visual art practice, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 305–317.
- Chu, SL, Brown, S, Park, H & Spornhauer, B 2020, ‘Towards Personalized Movie Selection for Wellness: Investigating Event-Inspired Movies’, International journal of human-computer interaction, vol. 36, no. 16, pp. 1514–1526.
- Rosenstock, J 2003, ‘Beyond A Beautiful Mind: Film Choices for Teaching Schizophrenia’, Academic psychiatry, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 117–122.