“The Truman Show” is a film directed by Peter Weir in 1998.
The plot’s spotlight is Truman Burbank, who was adopted and raised by a corporation since he was born, living inside a television show which simulated reality. Without knowing it, Truman is the main star of that show, since he is the only genuine person on it. Everything else, from his friends and family, to his neighbors and random strangers, his profession, the town he lives in, and even the weather and sky, is fake. This delusion that the main character lives in is very interesting, because what one can analyze as the film proceeds is how first Truman accepts and believes in this fake world, but then starts to deconstruct reality and begins to seek the truth. The sentence which best describes the roots of the philosophy behind this film is when Christof, the creator and director of the show, says: “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.” The strength of this sentence relies on how relevant and fundamental this principle is. Reality is constructed based on perception. How can one be sure that his whole life perceptions are truth? That values, people, even space and time, are real? There is no manner of being 100% sure, and this is what “The Truman Show” plays with. At the end of the film, when Truman finally is breaking the illusion of reality and discovers the set wall, climbing the stairs to the exit door, it is very intense and rewarding. As he goes up the steps towards the truth, one can relate to him and feel what he is feeling: The realization that all his doubts were real, that his life was going to start from that moment, closer to the truth. That sequence, and the whole film, has a connection with Plato’s epistemological philosophy in the Allegory of the Cave - In order to be closer to the truth and to overcome ignorance one has to free himself from preconceptions, beliefs, traditions and bias, which is a hard but gratifying quest. How can one release himself from his whole previous perception of life? Just like Truman, questioning. Doubting. Asking himself: Is this true? Is this really important? And pursuing the truth.
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Reading “Who’s Affraid of Visual Culture?”, a text by Johanna Drucker, made me question the identity and differences between Fine Art and Graphic Design.
When studying Art History and Design History, I was told that both disciplines were very distinctive, mainly because of their objectives and approaches in the creation process. What I realised while reading Drucker’s text is how incomplete and outmoded my previous perception of visual culture was: Fine Art and Graphic Design have much more similarities than differences, to a level in which it is difficult to clearly distinct between what is Art or what isn’t. Graphic Design has the status of “a dangerous interloper”, in the words of Drucker, because of its inherent relation to mass culture and commercial purposes. But how can this define the division between the former and Fine Art’s privileged status, when contemporary Fine Art also appropriates commercial imagery and design? In the words of Johanna Drucker: “The use of fine art imagery for commercial purposes already had an established track record, and the movement of images back and forth across the borders of fine and commercial art established a precedent for a similar migration of forms of composition, layout, and communicative rhetoric. The appropriations of commercial imagery and design that populate Pop art and then postmodern art, are simply part of a long history of such exchanges, each with its own historical character and charge.” These exchanges between fine art and commercial imagery are the main reason why it is so difficult to precisely define the border line between what is art and what is design. To exemplify this stance, Drucker introduces and analyses an exhibition, “Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age”, Merrill C. Berman's private collection of 20th-century posters, adverts, photomontages and graphic ephemera. It is through exhibitions likewise that one understands how “all the visual forms of contemporary life, fine art and commercial alike, have been shaped by the history of graphic design”. I found the text very interesting, even though I'm not so absorbed by Drucker's position on the other subject she expresses, how undervalued is American modern art history. Her perception of Visual Culture is what most captivates me, seeing all visual forms and disciplines at once and finding connections between them. Raunchy - Sexually exciting , suggesting sex in a way that is somewhat shocking, very dirty, smelly, obscene, used of sex, unkempt , naughty, bawdy. When an animation film is described as raunchy, it means that it’s meant for adults, that it might shock some children. The main example I found of an animation film being criticized as “raunchy” is the recent “Sausage Party” film. Although I haven’t seen it yet, I understand what raunchy means in this context - that the film has some violent or sexually shocking sequences, and jokes which only adults will understand.
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