http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBwzN4v1vA0

“In their introduction to an eclectic collection of nineteen essays titled Post-cinema: Cinema in the Post-art Era, editors Dominique Chateau and José Moure call attention to the challenges posed by the prefix “post- “, highlighting its current ubiquity and acknowledging its slipperiness…” (Holly, 2021) According to this view, post cinematic films can be descripted as a chaotic and a flexible type of production. Post cinema, which became very popular and useful especially in the beginning of the 21^st century, is being considered as one of the movements that offer a new “structure” in the cinema.

The film, “Requiem for a Dream” (2000) is a psychological thriller that shows the brutal sides of drug addiction and was directed by Darren Aronofsky. The film is known with its famous soundtrack called “Lux Aeterna”. The film is about a widow woman called Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) who wants to lose weight desperately and starts taking some pills in order to achieve her goal but that pill starts to harm her mental health and makes her addicted to it. 

In the film, especially the scenes, where the characters take the drugs and get high, can be considered as a “chaotic”. The usage of the soundtrack, the speedy transitions between the footages. And that chaotic editing can be seen in the trailer of the film. “By manipulating temporality through a musical logic, the narrative structure creates the climax momentum through the duration of the shots in relation to others. Among the most radical examples – which directly relates the distortion of time to the use of drugs – are the internal clashes between excessive dynamism and extreme stillness within the structure of one single scene.” (Rossi, 2017)

Based on these arguments, it can be understood that “Requiem for a Dream” can be considered as an example of post-cinema with its chaotic editings during the scenes of drug use. And the trailer shows exactly how chaotic those scenes are. 

Bibliography:

• Willis, H. (2021) ‘Review: Post-cinema: Cinema in the Post-art Era , edited by Dominique Chateau and José Moure’, Afterimage, 48(2), pp. 152–156. doi:10.1525/aft.2021.48.2.152.
• Rossi, L.L. (2017) ‘Requiem for a Dream: Drug aesthetics in audiovisual processes’, Technoetic arts : a journal of speculative research, 15(2), pp. 129–135. doi:10.1386/tear.15.2.129_1.

Kaan Cakir

09.11.2022