| Creator | Title | Emotional Sum (Sense of Life or emotional World View) | Theme |
|---|---|---|---|
| Composer: Verdi, Giuseppe | 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 |
| Director: Hudson, Hugh | Chariots of Fire | A complete feeling of openness of the world to greatness of your own choosing. | Life is achievement. |
| Ohara, Shoson | Crane Under the Rain | Life is difficult. | |
| Director: Korda Alexander | Rembrandt | Life is hard as an independent spirit, and wealth will elude you, but you will be happy, after a fashion. | |
| 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". |
| Director: Ardolino, Emile | Dirty Dancing | Life is passionate and meaningful. | The joy and passion of love and life and dancing, while learning integrity and independence. |
| Architect: Unknown | Burgos Cathedral Crossing | God is order and reason and light. | The spirit of god is rational, uplifting and rich in detail |
| Designer: Otar, John | Covered Box | Fun; complexity made from simplicity | |
| Director: Daldry, Stephen | Billy Elliot | Life is dirty but one can clean up. | Go after what you love. |
| Vase Painter: Euphronios | Euphronios Krater aka Sarpedon Krater | Exquisitely beautiful hardship. | |
| 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". |
| Myron? | Riace Bronze A | Man is strong and indomitable | Intelligence, Pride, Strength = Man |
| Designer: Unknown | Rose Window - La Sainte-Chapelle (aka The Holy Chapel | The world is open and bright and colorful and gay. | |
| 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. |
| Choreographer: Lander, Harold | 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.<br> |
| Author: Webster, Henry Kitchell | King in Khaki, A | Honesty is a noble and practical way of life. |
Business acumen produces both material wealth and moral right. The success of the entrepreneur in this story, along with his relation to all his staff and secondary and tertiary folks on the island who work for him -- makes him into a "king" based on important human relations and the rightness of his decisions that result in a successful business enterprise. A subsidiary theme might be termed the power of morality over physical power or economic "power". |
| Sculptor: unknown | Winged Victory | One of the great expressions of the Greek Classical and Hellenistic spirit -- that men (and women) are larger than life and triumphant. While the image is partially a fantasy since the woman is winged and probably represents a goddess: Nike -- this concretization depicts a "god" in the form of a human woman, thus glorifying women. |
The grandeur of being alive and free. |
| Blum, Robert Frederick | Moods to Music | Life is colorful and glorious. |
Pure joy of movement and femininity. |
| Director: McCarey, Leo | Ruggles of Red Gap | Happiness and fulfillment is in yourself. | Personal declaration of independence from servitude |
| Director: Tran, Anh Hung | The Taste of Things | test test test test |
tentative: the ideal world of physical creation of food shared by soulmates. |
| Director: Canet, Guillaume | Tell No One (aka Ne le dis à personne) | Life is sad, and controlled by mysterious corruption. | |
| Schaefer, Taf Lebel | Octopus | Playful. | |
| 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. |
| Director: Hudson, Hugh | Greystoke | Life is Loss -- life is grim and culture is grim and the jungle is grim. All is grim. The other important feature of the film emotionally is that Tarzan has been crippled by his circumstances of being brought up in the jungle -- he cannot live as a man, so the great tragedy of the story is that he has to return to the jungle, which is below primitive -- it is an isolated hell in which death is at every corner, and at best the companionship of apes. Given that the story partly portrays civilized men as brutes who relish killing animals, perhaps the emotional intent is to make the choice to return to the jungle as positive, but for this reviewer it is unutterably tragic and ugly. |
Loss, Loss, Loss. Man as metaphysically alien from human culture. |
| Author: Steinbeck, John | East of Eden | Life is filled with great and important choices. | The battle between good and evil, guilt and innocence. Takes the position that we are influenced by many things, but ultimately we have free will. |