Requiem for a Dream – Press Play Video Blog

Watch: Darren Aronofsky’s Symmetry Contains Explosive Energy

It’s easy enough to comment on the excess running through Darren Aronofsky’s films: the sex, the flesh, the drugs, the decadence, the violence, the loneliness, the despair–but what if the allure of his films lies elsewhere? What if the real reason we pay attention to them is because of the way the excess is packaged: in symmetrical frames, and sometimes in spirals that offset those frames? This video by Studio Little dances us through Aronofsky’s films, from ‘Black Swan’ to ‘Requiem for a Dream’ to ‘The Wrestler’ to ‘Noah’ to ‘Pi,’ showing us that, time after time, the element keeping us watching is the order, not the disorder.

Watch: Darren Aronofsky’s Assault on the Senses in ‘Requiem for a Dream’

Given that the eyes and the ears are the only two sense organs film can access (setting aside ersatz experiments with scratch-and-sniff giveaways at theaters), if a director wanted to make sensory overload part of a film’s experience, the key would be to make visual and auditory elements larger than life, so that they practically jump out of the screen at the viewer. And that, it seems, is what Darren Aronofsky has done with ‘Requiem for a Dream," a film of addiction and humiliation for which the word "harrowing" would be a gross understatement. In this dynamic and startling video, Jorge Luengo focuses on Aronofsky’s jarring close-ups and aggressive in-your-ears sound effects to make an elegant point about the film: that its sensual experience is a mainline, if you will, to its thematic concerns.