Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope, by Jadranka Skorin Kapov
Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope, which discusses all of the American director's films released from 1998 to 2014, is author Jadranka Skorin Kapov's third book and her first text related directly to film studies. Previous books by the author, who is a professor in Stony Brook University's College of Business, primarily address aesthetics and continental philosophy. Her diverse scholarly background proves to be an important asset for this book wherein the author uses key terms from the disciplines that she is a part of, compares Aronofsky to multiple existential philosophers and discusses the symbolic significance of spirals and other mathematical patterns in Pi (1998) for example. Film scholar Tarja Laine's new book, Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky, released approximately six months before Skorin Kapov's work on the director, instead focuses on the science of emotion and phenomenology. Laine's book and Skorin Kapov's book are both pioneering products of Aronofsky scholarship, a relatively new field, with Skorin Kapov addressing a wide variety of themes prevalent in Aronofsky's output, from Pi to Noah (2014) and Laine preferring topic specificity over topic diversity. Skorin Kapov's analysis does seem to take movie length into account, though, with the chapter on Pi being considerably shorter than the book's other chapters.