Corporate Video Production: What Film Are We Watching?
This week at Crash Symphony Productions, in order to inform our approach to corporate video production, we’re watching Mother! the brand new Aronofsky film features Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem.
Lawrence and Bardem play a couple, marked by a significant age difference. He’s a poet, and she’s an artist in her own right, and becomes a literal creator by having a child, and this is contrasted with artistic creation, so that there are three things: art, the house, life. This stands for the three different realms. Is is an interesting exploration of the ideas of the muse and female disposibility, and what it’s like to be in a relationship with a very particular sort of man. It’s a literalised metaphor in form and style, and while a lot of the criticisms about it are that it’s too on the nose, I think it justifies itself very well. It’s shot beautifully, and the sound editing is really interesting. It results in a very visceral filmic experience.
Female creativity is characterised as self-sacrificial and giving, in contrast to male creativity, which is life-taking, selfish, turned inward. It’s a really interesting story to bring to the screen, especially in such a visceral way. It makes sense that it’s a horror movie, because it is a horrific experience, and it happens every day. And it’s not really talking about or explored. It’s sad that a male director has to make a movie about it in order for it to be taken seriously, I can imagine if a woman had the exact same film it would have been laughed at and dismissed and too self-pitying, hyperbolic, hysterical, etc,. I think that’s quite significant.
Aronofsky must have learnt a lot from shooting his previous film Black Swan about a ballerina’s descent into psychosis, because his flowing camera-work as it tracks Lawrence is beautifuly fluid and has something of dancing flow about it.
We thoroughly recommend Mother!
