A black swan with red shoes

Black Swan is a 2010 American psychological thriller film directed by Darren Aronofsky, starring Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, and Mila Kunis. Its plot revolves around a production of Swan Lake by a prestigious New York City ballet company. The production requires a ballerina to play both the innocent White Swan and the sensual Black Swan. One dancer, Nina (Portman), is a perfect fit for the White Swan, while Lily (Kunis) has a personality that matches the Black Swan. When the two compete for the parts, Nina finds a dark side of herself.

Aronofsky conceived the premise by connecting his viewings of an actual production of Swan Lake with an unrealized screenplay about understudies and the notion of being haunted by a double, similar to the folklore surrounding doppelgängers and to the Capgras delusion. The director also considered Black Swan a companion piece to his 2008 film The Wrestler, with both films involving demanding performances for different kinds of art. He and Portman first discussed the project in 2000, and after a brief attachment to Universal Pictures, Black Swan was produced in New York City in 2009 by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Portman and Kunis trained in ballet for several months prior to filming and notable figures from the ballet world helped with film production to shape the ballet presentation. The film premiered as the opening film for the 67th Venice International Film Festival on September 1, 2010. It had a limited release starting December 3, 2010 and a nationwide release on December 17.

The Red Shoes (1948) is a British feature film about a ballet dancer, written, directed and produced by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, known collectively as The Archers. The movie employs the story within a story device, being about a young ballerina who joins an established ballet company and becomes the lead dancer in a new ballet called The Red Shoes, itself based on the fairy tale "The Red Shoes" by Hans Christian Andersen. The film stars Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook and Marius Goring and features Robert Helpmann, Léonide Massine and Ludmilla Tchérina, renowned dancers from the ballet world, as well as Esmond Knight and Albert Basserman. It has original music by Brian Easdale and cinematography by Jack Cardiff, and is well regarded for its creative use of Technicolor. Filmmakers such as Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese have named it one of their all time favorite films.

Although loosely based on the Andersen story, it was also said to have been inspired by the real-life meeting of Sergei Diaghilev with the British ballerina Diana Gould. Diaghilev asked her to join his company, but he died before she could do so. Diana Gould later became the second wife of Yehudi Menuhin.

Dance Mood: It's Cool!

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Bjork admits that she was "taking the piss" when she wore the Marjan Pejoski swan dress to the Oscars in 2001. "C'mon, you don't bring eggs unless you want to take the piss, right?" she told the Sunday Times. "Six of them that I left all over the red carpet. It was really funny, cos the lifeguards [she means security men] would pick them up and run after me with their walkie-talkies: 'Excuse me, miss, you dropped this.'" Famously a discoverer of new designers, Bjork gave Pejoski international recognition by wearing the dress, which she has since donated to a Russian ballet company, but she hadn't realised it would garner so much attention for herself. "I was actually amazed at how many people thought I was serious," she said. "I didn't mean to cause a riot."