Requiem for a Dream
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Requiem for a Dream, The Haunting and Sergeant York: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. theatrical release of Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s visually dazzling and emotionally shattering adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel about doomed addicts. When it came out in 2000, Requiem for a Dream more than delivered on the promise of Aronofsky’s 1998 debut feature Pi, taking that film’s ambitious experiments with subjective point of view to a whole new level; in Requiem, Aronofksy utilizes split screen, speeded up and slowed down motion, multiple exposures, impressionistic digital and practical special effects, unnatural lighting and clashing color temperatures, extreme focal lengths at either […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 16, 2020 -
Watch: “Like Requiem for a Dream“
Inspired by the rapid drug sequences in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, Candice Drouet envisions what other films could look like with a similar editing style. The latest Fandor Keyframe video essay reimagines films such as Drive, Pulp Fiction and Mad Max: Fury Road.
by Marc Nemcik on Jul 11, 2016 -
Jared Leto’s 30 Seconds to Mars Battles Record Companies at TIFF’s Artifact
Rock “documentaries” are self-serving films that fawn over their subjects so their record companies can move more product. The typical rock doc strings together concert highlights with studio clips and innocuous musician quotes that add up to a fun, but facile movie. The L.A. band 30 Seconds To Mars turns this formula upside-down in Artifact, which enjoyed its world premiere at TIFF on Friday. Actor/musician Jared Leto’s band wants to leave their record label, EMI, when multimillionaire British tycoon Guy Hands devours the ailing company and sues 30 Seconds To Mars for $30 million. Artifact tells their battle as they struggle to […]
by Allan Tong on Sep 17, 2012 -
DARREN ARONOFSKY’S UNSETTLING ANTI-DRUG ADS
Likely thanks to his work on the still-disturbing Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky was recently tapped to direct a series of anti-drug commercials for non-profit organization The Meth Project. The use of scare tactics in anti-drug campaigns is no new innovation (remember what happened to Rachel Leigh Cook’s brain?), but one has to wonder if the people responsible for commissioning these ads, which are set to air during an upcoming episode of Gossip Girl, would turn out quite so unsettling. Watch all four ads below. This one takes the cake for 30-second spot that you’d least expect to see […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Nov 11, 2011 -
Into the Splice: Black Swan
Things didn’t bode well from the beginning. The crowd in the theater was restive. People shifted uncomfortably in their seats even before the movie began. I was alone, and sat in the back, the projector whirring somewhere above and behind me. But that was only the beginning. As it turns out, I had been editing Alla Gadassik’s remarkable video-essay for the Requiem // 102 project, and had learned of an obscure Italian Jennifer Connelly film from 1988, Etoile (directed by Peter Del Monte), which also happens to be a nightmarish film about Swan Lake that also features a monstrous black […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jan 10, 2011 -
The Perfect Swan
(Editor’s Note: This essay contains spoilers.) In literature or in oratory, where rhetoric arose from, it’s somewhat difficult to separate the argument’s mode of persuasion from its substance. In order to make an entirely skilled rhetorical point, the writer or speaker will have to present a series of assumptions and assertions, facts and hypotheses, in such a way that makes the argument’s substance apparent. That’s why literature lends itself to the intellectual: it’s founded upon a progression of ideas. Cinema is often referred to as a different kind of linguistic medium (the “language of film”), but a linguistic one nevertheless, […]
by Zachary Wigon on Dec 10, 2010 -
A SHORT FILM FOR “REQUIEM FOR A DREAM”
The Requiem 102 project, in which various critics, writers, and filmmakers (mine is here) dissect individual frames of Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, is now in its third week, and the quality of submissions is both amazing and diverse. The latest is photographer Bruce Livingstone, who has made a short narrative commenting on the film’s early love scene. Reading the Love Scene in “Requiem for a Dream” from Bruce Livingston on Vimeo. Another good one: novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth Hand’s “potent blast to the nervous system.”
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 26, 2010 -
REMEMBERING THE PASTS AND FUTURES OF “REQUIEM FOR A DREAM”
This blog post is part of the Requiem 102 experiment: on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, different writers are each looking at the film through the prism of specific frames, one from each minute of the film. I’ve been assigned minute four. Follow all the responses here. For me, the most memorable scene in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream is not in the movie but in the script. I had read it before the film’s pre-production, and the scene in which dealers line up for a new shipment of drugs after […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 4, 2010 -
102 CELEBRATIONS OF REQUIEM FOR A DREAM
Nicholas Rombes, of The Rumpus’s 10/40/70 column and Filmmaker‘s Into the Splice, has launched an experimental project in film criticism — a Tumblr blog collecting 102 takes on Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. Tied to the film’s tenth anniversary (hey, where’s the features-packed new DVD?), the project consists of 102 contributors writing about 102 frames of the film — one for each minute of its running time. Writes Rombes: October 27 2010 marks the 10th anniversary of the release of Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, a movie that shook some foundations. To mark that and to extend the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 2, 2010
