Creator | Title | Emotional Sum (Sense of Life or emotional World View) | Theme |
---|---|---|---|
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. |
Painter: Alexander, John White | Repose | Life is extravagant and lush and sensual. | Feminine Sensuality is a main theme, though one can argue that a related (equal theme or sub-theme) is: The Lushness of the Material World. The dramatic draped womanly figure pressing against a divan, whose figure is clearly oulined, shares the visual dominance of the painting along with the magnificent sweeps of her dress and the giant pillows, the massive backrest, and even the strong elements of the floor material and the golden back wall. All together a remarkable composition. |
Author: Shute, Nevil | 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: |
Painter: Peale, Charles Wilson | Staircase Group (aka Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale) | Perceiving accurately is important and playing with the artistic medium is fun. | |
Director: McTiernan, John | Die Hard | The way to beat evil is to give no quarter, no compromise. Life is hard, but fighting for the right is rewarded. | Giving up in life is not an option. |
Director: Kurosawa, Akira | 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". |
Photographer: Ommer, Uwe | Pirelli Calendar Diver | Women can be strong, dynamic and unconsciously beautiful. | |
Designer: Eiffel, Gustave | Eiffel Tower | The works of Man are thrilling. | |
Screenwriter: Coward, Noel | Brief Encounter | Passionate love. Tragic choices. | High romance is possible. Such love is unlikely to survive. |
Director: Daldry, Stephen | Billy Elliot | Life is dirty but one can clean up. | Go after what you love. |
Rand, Ayn | Anthem | The book starts out psychologically dark and disorienting because of the protagonist struggling with the radically collectivist world he was born into. But what shows even in the early pages, and grows to the climax is the triumphant struggle of a rare few who break free of the yoke of total mind control and become free to live a life as a conceptual human and rediscover what it means to be an individual. Thrilling and emotionally satisfying (unless the reader is a committed determinist.) |
Ego and using one's individual mind is the core of being human. |
Painter: Leyendecker, J.C. | Day at the Beach | Fun and cuteness. | |
Director: Korda Alexander | Rembrandt | Life is hard as an independent spirit, and wealth will elude you, but you will be happy, after a fashion. | |
Playwright: Shakespeare, William | 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.<br> |
Director and Screenwriter: Curtis, Richard | Love Actually | Romantic love, family love, filial love, and the love of friendship are of central importance to human existence, and are possible to achieve. | Wonderful experiences of love are found in many forms and places. |
Composer: Handman, Lou | Are You Lonesome Tonight? | Sensuality and bitterness | The remembrance of past love. |
Rodin, Auguste | Shade, The | Life is a gruesome trial. There is no hope. | The world destroys man. (Some unknown evil force is destroying this young strong man.) Given that the sculpture is titled as a "Shade" and is related to the Group sculpture "Gates of Hell", one can presume the evil is some unnamed condition that can overpower life and cause destruction of the good. |
Director: Ballard, Carroll | Black Stallion | Everything is possible between boy and beast, between an innocent human and mother nature. | Man and nature in harmony. |
Architect: Guarini, Guarino | 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. |
Painter: Dewing, Thomas Wilmer | Comedia | Life is sumptuous and beautiful and alive. | Feminine vivacity and gaiety |
Director: Parker, Alan | Fame | Life is hard, but you can succeed, and it is worth it and exhilarating. | Go after your heart's desire. |
Director: Zinnemann, Fred | High Noon | There is palpable evil in the world. There is heroism in the face of evil in the world. The movie is full of fear and foreboding and betrayal. | Civil Society is the ideal, and worth fighting for. Doing what is right is the right way to live. Don't let the evil bastards win. The theme is expressed repeatedly in the movie via the contrast of the Marshall who grimly faces the need to do what he lives for, despite the death facing him, vs. the mealy mouthed town folk, many of which who won't fight for their civil society, and vs. the deputy marshall who portrays the sellout who will give into evil force in order to "get along". |
Composer: Warren and Dubin | Boulevard of Broken Dreams | Weariness & Sadness | Life is loss of dreams and sadness |
Sculptor: Saint-Gaudens, Auguste | Diana | Serenity in action. But not a strong world view in any case, quite placid. | |
Playwright: Shakespeare, William | Much Ado About Nothing | Sweetness and light and beauty are what the world is made of. |