View allAll Photos Tagged existentialism
movie still from
"pierrot le fou" (1965)
starring:
Jean-Paul Belmondo
&
Anne Karina
directed by:
Jean-Luc Godard
A security guard continues to patrol a building even after its occupants have disappeared, because his job is the only thing that ever gave his existence purpose.
movie still from
"pierrot le fou" (1965)
starring:
Jean-Paul Belmondo
&
Anne Karina
directed by:
Jean-Luc Godard
This short film explores reality, illusion, and the search for meaning in a seemingly perfect, technologically advanced world. Journey to the Hypostyle, a place where the truth is revealed. What would you choose: blissful ignorance or the raw, unadorned truth?
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Key words
Simulation, reality, illusion, utopia, dystopia, philosophy, technology, virtual reality, Hypostyle Hall, timelessness, choice, meaning of life, existentialism, question, debate, discussion, short film, sci-fi, thought-provoking
Naguib Mahfouz (1911 – 2006), was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq el-Hakim, to explore themes of existentialism.[1] He published over 50 novels, over 350 short stories, dozens of movie scripts, and five plays over a 70-year career. Many of his works have been made into Egyptian and foreign films.
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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Mark Huot will cover App Integration with ExpressionEngine at Engine Summit 2. Moments of existentialism may vary.
Soren Kierkegaard cards w/ vanilla or black envelopes, your choice. Nothing says "I feel you" quite like these. Sympathy, Philosophy major (oops!), Existentialist? These are for you. Blank on reverse. Write at your own free will. Because sepia and black are far too obvious, these cards are in provincial pink and sage.
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2. Engaging the Method: .
Fonnation ofidentity -Alienation and creativity -Culture as act -Social change and process of dia!og~e .
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-Ethics ofcare -Politics of deconstruction -Some concen1s in feminist discourse .
l~·_,;sential Reading: .
Heidegger, Martin, 1978, Being and Time, trans. 1. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Oxford: Basil .
Blackwell. .
Heidegger, Martin, 1968, What is Called Thinking?, trans. Gray, New York: Harper and Row. .
Sartre, J.P., 1966, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Bamess, New York: Washington .
Square Press. .
Sartre, J.P., 1949, T11e Psychology ofImagination, trans. B. Frecht, London: Rider. .
Supple1nentaJy Readings: Heidegger, Martin, 1959, 'On the Essence ofTruth,' Existence and Being, ed. W. Brock, .
Chicago: Regnery. .
Husserl, E., 1964, T11e Idea ofPhenomenology, Hague: Martinus Nijho.ff. .
Sartre, J.P., 1960, Problem ofMethod, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, London: Methuen. .
Husser!, E., 1973, Experience and Judgment, trans. J.S. Churcrul and K. Arneriks, London: .
Routledge and Kegan Paul. .
Sartre, J.P., 1976 ( 1982), Critique ofDialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed. .
Jonathan Ree, London: Verso!NLB. .
Sartre, J.P., 1962, Sketch to the Theor;· ofthe Emotions, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London: .
Methuen. .
Merleau-Ponty, M., 1962, Phenomenology ofPerception, trans. Collin Smith, London: .
Routledge & Kegan Paul. .
Camus, Albert, 1960, Myth ofthe Si~yphus, London: Hamilton. .
Cruikshank, J., 1960, Albert Camus, New York: Oxford University Press. .
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Fromm, Erich, 1942 (2002), The Fear ofFreedom, London: Routledge. .
Harper, Ralph, 1949, Existentialism: A Theo1y ofMan, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University .
\ Press. .
Beauvoir, Simmone De, 1949 (1953), The Second Sex, London: Pan Books. .
Weiss, Paul, 1950 ( 1955), Man's Freedom, New Haven: Yale University Press. .
Blackham, H.J., 1956, Six Existentialist Thinkers, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. .
Schachtel, E.G., 1959, Metamorphosis, New York: Basic Books. .
Parka, Fredrick, 1962, Existential Thinkers and Thought, New York: The Citadel Press. .
Krishna, Daya, Consideration Towards A Theory ofSocial Change, Bombay: l\1anaktalas. .
Menser, Anthony, 1966, Sartre: A Philosophical Study, University ofLondon: The Athlone .
Press. .
tvfehta. J.L., 1967, The Philosophy ofMartin Heidegger, Varanasi: BHU. .
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Maurice Mandelbaum, 1955 (1969), The Phenomenology ofMoral ~'xperience, London: John I-!opkins Press. Schacht, Richard, 1970 ( 1971 ), Alienation, London: George Allen and Unwin. , .
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movie still from
"pierrot le fou" (1965)
starring:
Jean-Paul Belmondo
&
Anne Karina
directed by:
Jean-Luc Godard
A modern day picture of Nick Carraway meeting Jay Gatz for the first time in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, "The Great Gatsby."
University life was never just about classes and requirements. It was, above all, a chaotic ritual of discovery. Among old libraries and dorm rooms smelling of burnt coffee, you'd encounter sounds that seemed to come from another time. Suddenly, funk would enter your life unannounced: that fat bass, that wah-wah guitar, that drum kit that made you nod your head even if you were studying for a midterm.
We didn't call it "retro culture" back then. It was simply our culture. We rummaged through vinyl records in secondhand shops, shared hand-recorded cassettes, and played Stevie Wonder, Parliament, Funkadelic, or Kool & The Gang while discussing French existentialism or chaos theory in the cafeteria. That music wasn't background noise. It was the very pulse of the era in which we were being shaped.
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TETRA - Spacetrip Bomber
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I don't have an answer to this question. It's not my job to come up with answers, just to ask stupider questions. Electricity is going everywhere. Why? Because it has to? If I were electricity, I'd be asking myself the tough questions. Am I better off here than I was over there? What is here? What do I mean by here? What is I? What's in it all for me? Etc. Then I would take a nap.
movie still from
"pierrot le fou" (1965)
starring:
Jean-Paul Belmondo
&
Anne Karina
directed by:
Jean-Luc Godard
taken way too high on a rooftop one of my last nights in ann arbor until next fall. a wonderful way to spend a midnight. =)
i've been thining too much about dreams and real life lately...
and all the things in "real life" that people deem so important... are they really?
new blog post: www.paigecomrie.blogspot.com
What's the point of living in Las Vegas if you don't get trashed with your bestie on a random weeknight?
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.