| Creator | Title | Emotional Sum (Sense of Life or emotional World View) | Theme |
|---|---|---|---|
| Painter: Emil Carlsen | The Samovar |
The world is full of textural richness worth looking at. |
The richness of light and the objects it caresses. This is a paean to the richness of visual experience, but with the simplest of materials -- just a light source and two kinds of simple unadorned objects. |
| Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright | Johnson Wax Building |
Day to day life can be exalted and pleasurable. |
To Work should be a condition of grandeur and joy. |
| Director: Marshall Herskovitz | Dangerous Beauty |
The world is a horrible split of conventional marital morality vs. honest but promiscuous morality. The way to live requires one sacrifice one's body for one's soul. |
The importance of accepting your own rules for living, your own morality. |
| Architect: Guarino Guarini | Real Chiesa di San Lorenzo (Royal Church of St. Lawrence) |
The world is perfected. The joy of seeing complexity that is simplicity, i.e., that the rich complex vision arises from simple elements which because of their arrangement provide layers of visual thrills. |
Complex, soaring geometric order. |
| Director: Hugh Hudson | Chariots of Fire |
A complete feeling of openness of the world to greatness of your own choosing. |
Life is achievement. |
| Author: Nevil Shute | Far Country, The |
Life can be bright, happy and successful, but hard decisions must be faced and dealt with. |
A good and happy life is made up of self-directed actions, self-chosen goals. A less important theme is: |
| Choreographer: Harold Lander | Etudes |
Thrilling pleasure at beautiful movement and great success at developing the best within you. |
Hard work results in great achievement in life -- and that results in beauty and excitement in life. |
| Composer: Giuseppe Verdi | Attila (live performance) |
Life is a mix of strength, heroism, romantic passion. The work is a long complex opera, so it has many other lyrical emotions as part of it, but this covers the basic sense of life. |
Loving a heroic woman leads to death |
| Singing Group: Soviet Army Chorus and Band | Wait for Your Soldier |
Happiness triumphs. |
The power of joy to motivate action. |
| Miron - Parish: | Tzena Tzena Tzena |
Joyous celebration |
Joyous celebration |
| Author: Henry Kitchell Webster | Real Adventure, The |
Life is wonderful as long as you realize that life has to be earned the hard way. |
Creating your self is the only way to live. |
| Director: Oliver Stone | Wall Street |
There are bad people in power who use ordinary people as pawns in their endless pursuit of money. Those who are not ruthless are sheep to be slaughtered by the rich and powerful. Greed is bad. |
Financiers are amoral money-grubbing backstabbers, i.e., desire for money corrupts |
| Director: Akira Kurosawa | Rashomon |
The world is terrible and full of disasters and mankind is awful and pathetic. |
Objectivity is a myth -- everyone sees a different reality, a different "story". |
| Director: Lasse Hallstrom | Chocolat |
Pleasure is good; religion and conventional thinking is bad. |
Follow your dream and disregard convention. |
| Landscape Designer: Fletcher Steele | Blue Steps of Naumkeag |
elegance and grace |
The man-made enhances nature -- it is what makes nature beautiful |
| Painter: Ettore Tito | La Gomena (Towing a Boat) |
There is great effort in life, and a woman can be the master of it. This painting is a curious combination of romantic heroism and 19th century genre naturalism. It has a visual dynamism and dramatic content that is strongly romantic, yet the subject is the prosaic task of pulling a boat out of the water. |
The will and the power of a woman. Implacable determination. |
| Director: Fredi Murer | Vitus |
If you have the will, you can find the way to live the way you want. |
Living your life your own way is the only right way. |
| Director: Coppola Francis Ford | Godfather |
Life demands death; life is a horror of killing and retribution. Life is tragedy and malevolence |
Behind beauty and success lies corruption and death. |
| Sculptor: Jean Baptiste (1630-1700) Tuby | Chariot of Apollo |
The world has thrilling powerful men of action. There are no limits to what can be achieved. |
Elegant, physical power. The fantasy ability to fly through water and air with grace and ease. |
| Composer: Lerner and Loewe | Camelot |
One must attempt to live by values, even though virtue is powerless and hopeless. |
Camelot: a medieval place of goodness and justice, and its inevitable failure. |
| Playwright: William Shakespeare | Othello: the Moor of Venice |
Malevolence and horrible tragedy is unrelieved. Evil is potent. |
A great man can be gullible and controlled by an evil character. Or, an evil character can have potency in the world, because of the weakness of a good man. |
| Composer: Alfredo Catalani | Ebben? Ne andrò lontana (aria from La Wally) |
Longing is the overall emotional tone of the music. The lyric gives reason to this overall tone. |
Sadness at having to leave forever the place where you were happy once. |
| Author: Nevil Shute | Trustee from the Toolroom |
A feeling of gentleness, kindness and generosity towards good people in the world. |
The importance of pursuing one's personal values. |
| De Felitta, Raymond: | City Island |
Anxiety and pain from all the lies and mistaken motives. Catharsis from the climax, leading to feelings of wanting to be truthful in life! |
Lying is not the way to live. |
| Painter: Thomas Wilmer Dewing | Comedia |
Life is sumptuous and beautiful and alive. |
Feminine vivacity and gaiety |