To me it seems a lot simpler. The perspective of the shot juxtaposes a lone man always against something much larger than himself - facing it head on. It's an archetypically heroic pose. If it has to do with anything Kantian I'd think it would have less to do with his moral philosophy and more to do with the realm of the noumena and phenomena and his transcendental philosophy as contemplated by a lone man who for the first time sees something of the shape of things from a vantage point above the fog.
The heroic pose may be timeless, but in Friedrichs painting it has a novel (I believe) interpretation in that we see the hero from the back, and he is dark and unspecific, while the vista is bright. So rather than focus on the hero as an object (as we do with e.g. Michelangelo David), we identify with the hero (because he is "generic" and have the same position as we have relative to the image) and contemplate the vista along with him. We become the hero. I believe this is the effect that the movie posters also strive for.
The abstract archetype is a collective cultural event, expressed through various forms and media, but derived from a shared system of values and its corollaries (it's less a spontaneous eruption of the "collective conscience" than an emergent property of the value system).
Yes, the spiritual wanderer contemplating existence is a Western archetype of indeterminable root. Yet the Wanderer is a specific concrete precipitation which propagates forward in time but does not appear to have any precedent (to a certain, albeit arbitrary, level of pattern-matching strictness). Thus, while the Wanderer does not monopolise the archetype, it does lie at the root of a specific visual heritage of that archetype.
Excellent observation! To me the picture evokes Byron rather than, Kant - solitude, reflection on the state of the world from a distance, from a subjective higher ground. Ultimately, growing up and away from being one with peers, to being an independent being, defining your own person by rejecting what it is not.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Byron was the absolute Elvis of 1818, when this was painted, and the image is as Byronic as can be.
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me,
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture: I can see
Nothing to loathe in Nature, save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Classed among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.
(This from a man who used to spend four hours on his toilette before breakfast at 1 pm.)
It's also as far from Kant as you can get. Kant never travelled more than 10 miles from Konigsberg in his life, for Pete's sake – where the housewives, as the saying goes, would set their clocks by his afternoon walk.
Nice post on an interesting time: The world lost its value; life lost its meaning; the individual no longer had grounds to reason about right and wrong. Those who articulated this dissatisfaction were the early Romantics, and they ushered in a new artistic, literary, and intellectual movement. In the process they created several iconic anti-roles that we still recognize in popular culture.
Byronic hero: the wanderer, the outcast, the Wandering Jew, the mysterious criminal whose crime is never explained.
The Visionary: the first stage of recovery and the first positive Romantic anti-role. The word often used at the time was “mystic.” The Visionary tries to observe the world so intensely as to get to the essence outside of all mental categories. It was felt to be the special task and privilege of the artist and poet to communicate that experience.
The Bohemian: perhaps the most modern of the anti-roles, characterized by a fascination with alcohol and drugs and sexual experimentation as ways to shift and change consciousness, put the mind through permutations of perceptions which are impossible for the square who is boxed in by his social role. Similar is the interest in non-bourgeouis modes of living, in indifference to middle-class standards of dress, furnishing, and cleanliness.
The Virtuoso: The Visionary avoided role-playing; the Bohemian defied it; the Virtuoso and Dandy transcended it, the one by fantastic mastery, the other by irony. Paganini was the first great Virtuoso and for decades the anti-role model and ideal. Other examples are Richard Burton the Virtuoso traveler and translator of the Arabian Nights, and the Virtuoso mountain climber who performs sublime feats of superhuman effort “because it was there.”
The Dandy: transforms the role not by excess but by irony. The role of the highest status in European society is that of the aristocratic gentleman of leisure. By willfully playing this role better than those born and trained to it, the Dandy reveals the pointlessness of the socially adapted. The social type with the highest status spends his life in play and pettiness. The Dandy instead offers perfection and elegance without content, without social function. By stealing the clothes of society, he reveals its nakedness. He demands a greater exquisiteness and perfection than society can achieve. This explains the irritation of society with the Dandy, its efforts to deprive him of his ironic authority, the moral nastiness with which England relished the downfall of Oscar Wilde.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you're Russian. Byron is better remembered in Russia than he is in the English-speaking world, perhaps because of the close affinity to Pushkin. Moreover (and I am only saying this because the thread is so obscure that its Expected Flame Value is low enough that I will probably get away with it) Russians tend to be better educated, at least literarily, than we are.
Yes, I'm a Russian, and Pushkin is indeed my "Byron connection". Funny how predictable things like that could be.
I think your last sentence is selection bias at play - a non-Russian is more likely to meet an educated Russian, rather than the average one. This bias likely accounts for 99% of the appearance. For the remaining 1% you may actually have a valid point - literary education in the 20th century Russia was a bigger part of the education system, even on the technical tracks, when compared to the US.
Forgive me, but I have to protest. Those are like responding to a comment on Elvis with some [EDIT: removed offensive and distracting epithet] cartoons about Lisa Marie's marriage to MJ. Hardly "obligatory".
It would be better to learn something about Byron. He is arguably the most iconic figure of the 19th century, extraordinarily compelling and interesting, and his life was one of the laboratories in which modern identity was created.
To me, this juxtaposition lays bare the true nature of Hollywood for all to see: a bunch of derivative, hypocritical, entitled, self-righteous hacks that go around calling themselves "creators" while simultaneously attacking the rights of the public with their copyright-maximalist agenda.
OK, perhaps I didn't get all of that from a painting and a couple of movie posters but you get the idea. At some point everything in art derives from something else. The notion that, absent permission, this is somehow "wrong" just blows my mind completely.
That is what the article argues or at least that they are similar in concept. Since the painting is from the romantic era it could suggest that the studios have adopted a the concept because of the recession. I wouldn't be surprised if the movie industry has trend forecasting like many other industries.
On the other hand it might just be that they are teaser poster. If we are really going for similarity the poster for 2012 is a pretty good fit[0]. Of course I'm not sure if you actually had anything to add or just wanted a Seinfeld moment?
"Briefly, the categorical imperative states: “Act only according to the maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” Whoa! That certainly describes the extreme nature of tons of the protagonists/antagonists of these various films. From Bane and Batman in The Dark Knight Rises to everyone in Inception, the idea of finding a universal truth and then applying it (sometimes forcefully) onto everyone seems to be exactly what’s at the core of all these movies."
Philosophy grad here. Absolutely none of these characters are exemplary of Kantian moral philosophy. That goes for about 99% of blockbuster heroes.
The key thing to understand is that 'universal' is a technical term in Kantian philosophy. Kant doesn't use this term to designate a relationship like that between a genus and its species, a class and its instances, or a set and its members. 'Universal' in Kant is synonymous with 'necessary', as in, "all stones necessarily fall back down to the ground if I throw them in the air." So what the categorical imperative really says is, "Live your life as if it were a force of necessity", or a more humanist formulation, "Live your life as if you were fulfilling your duty." If that sounds weird, realize that Kant doesn't think altruism qualifies as a foundation for morality because it's still based on pleasure, which for him brings us right back to egoism.
In terms of blockbusters, Watchmen's Rorschach or The Dark Knight's Joker are better approximations.
> Kant doesn't use this term to designate a relationship like that between a genus and its species, a class and its instances, or a set and its members.
Doesn't he simply mean universal law as in "a law that applies in every situation"? So the universe of discourse would be situations. I think your formulation with "necessity" is rather more ambiguous, because it doesn't stress the deontic nature of the statement.
"A law that applies in every situation" is an instance of empirical universality, which is the weaker species of universality. Kant's entire problem with this is that a principle that has to be applied to a case in order to be true can admit exceptions since the only way to actually prove it true is to intractably observe every situation, so instead the warrant for the principle ends up being a mere inference. On this point he's specifically going after Hume: If I can only infer that the sun will rise tomorrow because it rose yesterday and the day before, I still leave open the possibility that the sun simply won't rise tomorrow. This is how Hume started questioning necessary causality and Kant totally freaked out.
Pure Universality is strictu sensu synonymous with necessity because a principle of this sort is a condition of possibility. This example is technically incorrect, but for illustrative purposes all stones either necessarily fall back down to the ground when thrown up in the air or I'm not able to write this. Kant thought causality in much the same way, either human beings can necessarily conceive of it without any empirical support or experience in toto is impossible.
Kant explicitly wants to derive morality from Pure rather than empirical reason. Self-interest, altruism, pleasure, and even our everyday notion of happiness are set by the wayside in the name of actions that wholly brought about by principle than any expectation of reward, service to a higher cause, or just plain conformity (which are all arguably the same thing).
The key thing to realize is that Kantian morality is really really inhuman: for all intents and purposes, Kant wants to automate morality. Hence my language of "Act as if you were a force of necessity".
More like most blockbuster movies from the last two to three years. Neat trend, but hardly representative of all film posters in general. When I think of blockbuster movie posters, I think of Drew Struzan's work for Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Now that's iconic.
Interesting article, but blockbuster posters come in a myriad of formats - I was actually expecting a "hero prominently at the center, sidekicks scattered around the background of the frame" kind of thing, much like that GI Joe: Retaliation movie (cf links). I just checked a few on the top of my head, and the only one that follows the painting style is I Am Legend for obvious reasons.
It's also a good "Rückenfigur". As the saying goes "people's backs are boring". Ruckenfiguren have to be well executed to be interesting. In this case invite the observer in.
But yeah, it's just one of many 'themes' in blockbuster posters.
