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Our best photos from the 2019 Denver Film Festival. Here: "Escape from Godot." Escape-room antics meet iconic existentialism in this absurd, theatrical, interactive play puzzle. The show brings audiences into the middle of a production of "Waiting for Godot" – you know, the important one about our meaningless trudge from cradle and to grave. And everything is going wrong. You have 60 minutes unravel the clues and set the play straight again. This fun group activity allows for eight people at a time. All photos by John Moore for the DCPA NewsCenter.
Latex, Styrofoam, Mod-rock, Scrim, Plaster. November 2015
Doll used as a prop within my video final piece, in relation to the photograph of the syrian refugee boy washed onto the beach to relate current day issues to existentialism, my face representing the uneasy coexistence of mind and body.
I am very interested in zodiac signs and I believe that they guide us in the universe. Thinking about existentialism I decided to draw several zodiac signs including mine. Then I put the drawing of the observatory that I did with watercolors. I used the observatory to represent the aim of my research on astrology. Later on, I digitally put my drawing of a pregnant woman in order to reflect the idea that everyone is born with different zodiac signs. We come to the world without having a chance to make decisions about our life. So, everything we have when we are born are our presents in this universe. As a result, our zodiac signs are our gifts. We need every type of person in our lives. Similarly, each zodiac sign has a purpose in our lives. So besides the genders, colors and nations I think astrology is one of the most important research to describe every human being.
The two images presented—one of a skeletal bride, the other of a cloaked figure by the sea—at first appear to come from vastly different cultural and historical contexts. Yet their shared bodily posture, an outstretched arm holding drapery, reveals a curious semiotic bridge between them. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ (1915-1980) semiotic framework, this article will explore how these images communicate death, ritual, and the uncanny through both denotation (the literal) and connotation (the symbolic), while also considering the cultural resonance of their shared gesture.
The first image by the mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide (1942-) “Novia Muerte”/ “Bride Death” (1986), depicts a figure dressed in a wedding gown, complete with veil and bouquet standing against a rough stone wall. The bridal gown is long and pale, with delicate floral decorations. Draped across the arm and extending outward is a sheer veil, which falls almost to the ground. However, the face is replaced with a skull, signaling death rather than marriage. The skeletal visage contrasts sharply with the softness of the gown, producing a macabre parody of a wedding portrait. The denotative level is straightforward: a skeletal bride posed against a stone wall. Connotatively, the image subverts the traditional cultural symbol of the bride, who usually embodies purity, fertility, and new beginnings. Here, instead, the signifiers of matrimony are invaded by death, suggesting decay beneath the veil of social ritual.
The second image, drawn from Ingmar Bergman’s (1918-2007) The Seventh Seal (1957), shows the personification of Death himself, cloaked in black and standing against a dramatic seaside landscape. A lone figure standing on a rocky shoreline beneath a clouded sky. The figure is cloaked entirely in black, with a hood framing a pale face. One arm extends outward, spreading the cloak wide so that it forms a dark, wing-like shape against the dramatic seascape. The figure is solemn, silent, and imposing, its presence emphasized by the stark landscape around it. The image is iconic, immediately recognizable as a cinematic personification of Death.
At the denotative level, both images present costumed figures in theatrical settings. Yet at the connotative level, each carries a dense symbolic charge. Denotatively, it is an actor in costume, but connotatively it represents the inevitability of mortality, cosmic confrontation, and the silence of the afterlife. Where the skeletal bride fuses love and death in grotesque juxtaposition, Bergman’s Death embodies solemn inevitability.
What unites these images most strikingly is the shared posture: both figures extend the left arm outward, holding the drapery of their garment. Semiologically, this gesture carries multiple layers of meaning. On the denotative level, it is a practical display of fabric, a way of extending one’s presence visually. On the connotative level, however, the gesture recalls ritualistic unveiling and theatrical revelation. In both cases, the figure becomes larger than life, extending its symbolic power across space.
In the case of the skeletal bride, the gesture mocks the ceremonial display of a wedding gown, what should be a proud unveiling of beauty becomes instead a grotesque exposure of mortality. In Bergman’s Death, the gesture resembles a priestly or monarchic display of authority, stretching the cloak as if to encompass the world, reminding the viewer of the totalizing reach of death.
Despite their different cultural origins, the festive, macabre traditions of death in the mexican popular culture versus the stark existentialism of mid-20th-century Scandinavian cinema, the same bodily gesture operates as a semiotic constant, a signifier of revelation, power, and inevitability.
For Barthes, myth operates when cultural signs are emptied of their original meaning and filled with new ideological content. In these images, myth is at work in two distinct but convergent ways. The bride-as-skeleton invokes the myth of the "fatal union" between love and death, a theme as old as the danse macabre of medieval Europe but here reframed through local cultural practices that embrace death with irony and parody. The Bergman image, meanwhile, constructs a myth of Death as a universal adversary, solemn, philosophical, and inescapable.
The posture itself becomes mythic when considered across contexts. It is not just a gesture of fabric display, it is the myth of unveiling, a ritual act that reveals the truth behind appearances. In the skeletal bride, what is revealed is the futility of earthly rituals in the face of decay. In Bergman’s Death, what is revealed is mortality itself, stretched wide as an eternal horizon.
That two such different traditions converge in a shared bodily posture suggests a deeper semiotic archetype at play. Gestures of unveiling and cloaking seem to transcend culture, serving as visual shorthand for the revelation of truths otherwise hidden. Both images embody a theatricality that stages death not as absence but as presence—an active, looming force that demands recognition.
Thus, while one image belongs to the carnivalesque inversion of ritual (the skeletal bride mocking marriage), and the other to the solemn existential meditation of European cinema (Bergman’s cloaked Death), their convergence in posture points to a universal semiotic code: death, across cultures, is always both concealed and revealed, hidden in ritual yet unveiled in gesture.
Through a Barthesian reading, these images show us that semiotics is not confined within cultural boundaries but operates across them, shaping myth through shared gestures and archetypes. The skeletal bride and Bergman’s Death, though worlds apart in origin, both stretch out their garments to unveil mortality. One mocks, the other solemnly proclaims, yet both remind us of the same truth: death is always present, always theatrical, and always waiting to be revealed.
•Graciela Iturbide “Novia Muerte”, Chalma, Mexico, 1986.
•Ingmar Bergman “The Seventh Seal”, 1957
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Some people say there is no God because you cannot prove he/she exists...I disagree. Look at this, I posit there must be a God/ess, because you cannot prove he/she does not exist.
That which is not explained EXISTS.
Or as Einstein said "Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy."
1. Route 66 in California, 2. Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4, 3. church, 4. Davidman's Homowack, 5. 25-365, 6. Tow Truck, 7. _MG_6372, 8. Abandoned Diner, 9. Peter Pan stride, 10. Momma & Babies, 11. Dog is my copilot, 12. 365-152 Mt. Hood Wrapped in Pink, 13. Kiki Tries On Aretha's Hat -- Let Freedom Ring, 14. Wow! It's a BOY!!!, 15. patch, 16. EON Service Centre, 17. Existentialism On Prom Night, 18. Mistakes, 19. 23/365, 20. Praying Mantis on Geranium, 21. Mom's mini home garden, 22. Chaveiro Battle Royale, 23. View of the frozen Potomac River from the Georgetown Waterfront., 24. R-E-S-P-E-C-T, 25. and making her self right at home!
Created with fd's Flickr Toys.
Kevin poses with my book in order to mock me last Thanksgiving. Found this while looking through old photos. :-)
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© 2011 Arielle Somberg
This two-toned, opaline ring is one of it's kind, featuring more of the flying saucers that reoccur in my drawings.
Deze foto van Paulien Oltheten hoort bij het artikel van Rob Wijnberg over de frase 'Ik werk, dus ik ben' van 29 juli in nrc.next en op www.dusikben.nl: weblogs.hollanddoc.nl/dusikben/2009/07/29/wie-ik-ben-nou-...
Het artikel heeft de titel 'Wie ik ben? Nou, ik zit in vastgoed'.
4th of April until 27nd of June 2009 at BuroDijkstra ArtGallery.
Installation Persuasion - Idea, attitude, or action By Edwin Stolk
Also visit me at:
http://www.edwinstolk.nl/
to the essential insanities in living the still life with woodpecker: feminism, anti-capitalism, the Beatles, redheadedness, wonder, wanderlust, sugar and lust, the moon, Egypt, peachfish, outlaws, existentialism, and love.
I was doing these illustrations when I wrote a small abstract about Simone de Beauvoir’s “Woman as Other” at university.
A Bouquet for Spring, 2016, signed color digital print on 12 x 18 heavy gloss paper, backed with cardboard in plastic sleeve and shipped in 14 1/4 x 20" bubble mailer.
50 dollars or euro foreign exchange equivalent plus 4 dollars NY State Tax and shipping costs based on location. If interested, please send a message to dbschell1@aol.com
movie still from
"pierrot le fou" (1965)
starring:
Jean-Paul Belmondo
&
Anne Karina
directed by:
Jean-Luc Godard
Today's architecture can no longer be thought of as an inert envelope protecting its human occupant, like a hollow sculpture.
Is architecture a device that redoubles the dualistic conception of a consciousness or of a soul trapped in a body? Is architecture this subtle artifice that protects this being who does not entirely belong to the order of nature, this being we call man?
More than ever, however, thought tends to question the ontological divide between man and nature. in the classical century, Spinoza already criticized those who conceived of man as an "empire within an empire"; are we now able to overcome this cutoff, do we have the practical and theoretical tools to overcome it? is it possible to think of architecture from nature and not from man?
we postulate that phenomenology, existentialism, Heidegger and his man who lives as a poet are no longer of any help to us ... These thoughts on which the teaching of neo-modern architecture was based have long since gone beyond their expiration date. No more perceived space, no more routes, more expansion and spatial compression: but devices making it possible to respond to a world without hierarchy, without transcendence where multiple powers are agitated: the power of plant germination, the power of devouring of plants. animals, the power of unnatural human rituals ...
There is no longer any question of enslaving the earth to man. it is now a question of making human bodies and their organic rhythms collaborate with other rhythms (animals, plants, etc.), of conceiving an architecture of becoming, of movement, of inventing constructions that coordinate both ruinification process, human habitation rituals, the cycle of the seasons, animal migrations ...
The philosophical meaning of Absurdism is belief that the universe is irrational and meaningless and that the search for order brings the individual into conflict with the universe. And darker meaning of the flower, Anemone, is fading hope. But positive meaning is Anticipation, which can lead to existentialism
My heart just goes out to the Iranian people.. on CNN I'm told about the importance of "objectivity" and think they must have failed there existentialism classes.. I guess this is there reaction to the trending topic in social media of CNN's failing.. The heart yields the metaphysical truth that we are all one.. so God bless the Iranian people.
I just wish the font worked a little better small