For a character who is the creator of these edifices (the architect, the pharoah, the investor), show us their perspective from the top down.
Watch Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will for a superb example on the dynamics of photographing architecture and large spaces.
For paintings and sculpture, travel in and out and/or around the piece itself. The forced perspective of Michaelangelo’s David presumes that it sits atop a building and is the human version of gigantic public art.
For music, start close on the sheet music or the fingers of the player. Pull out to a wider shot and see how the music affects others. See the “Play it again, Sam” scene in Casablanca.
In The Benny Goodman story, by shooting from below the elbows up to his face, we see him and the power of the instrument. The camera looking up typically implies that person is more powerful in some way than we who are looking at them.
In Hemingway and Gellhorn Ernest writes standing up, with the paper on top of the dresser drawer. We see from the side his arms and hands moving. The oldie-but-goodie shot is the close-up as the typewriter keys move up to hit the page of paper. That’s rather dated, but you can see the same concept with keyboards and computers, as well as on cell phones – both the typing in and the readouts. Today’s technology plays an important part in the new Sherlock Holmes Masterpiece Mystery series.
The oposite POV is the camera standing face-on to the writer as she types out the story. You don’t see the type hit the page but you do see the emotions that she feels. The same thing can be done with musicians as we observe the effect their music has on them.
Conclusion
Humans would not be human without art. Make this an integral aspect of at least one of your characters and you can expand your audience reach and recognition.
The arts are wonderfully complex and contradictory worlds within themselves. Placing your characters in those turbulent streams of creativity, power, pride, temptation, defeat, or victory can create compelling dramatic conflicts and resolutions.
*****
Exercise #1 – Awareness
What to you is the most beautiful piece of art, be it painting, music, dance, sculpture, writing, etc.?
*****
Exercise #2 – Writing
Write 2-3 lines of dialogue where one character is trying to explain something to another character. First make one of them an artist and the other one not.
Then rewrite the scene with both characters as artists so they won’t have to keep explaining the jargon.
*****
Further Reading
Ada – Vladimir Nabokov
Book of Kells, The – and other illustrated manuscripts
Concerning the Spiritual in Art – Wassily Kandinsky
Fountainhead, The – Ayn Rand
How Ireland Saved Civilization – Thomas Cahill
Idylls of the King – Alfred Lord Tennyson
Inner Drives – Pamela Jaye Smith
Interaction of Color - Joseph Albers
Paleopoetics – Christopher Collins
Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
Point and Line to Plane – Wassily Kandinsky
Power of the Dark Side – Pamela Jaye Smith
Symbols.Images.Codes – Pamela Jaye Smith
White Goddess, The – Robert Graves
Further Viewing
Basquait
Black Swan
(Burden of Dreams), Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Fitzcarraldo – Werner Herzog (about)
Chorus Line
Commitments, The
De-Lovely
Dream Girls
Fame
Fitzcarraldo
Girl in the Cafe, The
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Glee and High School Musical
How Art Made the World – BBC series
La Boheme – Puccini’s opera about starving artists in Paris
Mao’s Last Dancer
Mister Holland’s Opus
Muse, The
New York Stories
Phantom of the Opera, The
Pianist, The
Picture of Dorian Gray, The
Pink Panther, The
Pollack
Power of Myth, The – Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers
Rent - the modern adaptation of Puccini’s La Boheme
Searching for Sugar Man – Oscar-winning documentary
Sentinals of Silence
Shakespeare in Love
Slings and Arrows – Canadian series about a Shakespeare company
Soloist, The
Still Crazy
Thomas Crown Affair, The – about a playboy art thief and a detective
To Catch a Thief
Topkapi
Xanadu – Olivia Newton-John is a roller-skating muse
Websites
Masonic World http://www.masonicworld.com/education/files/artjan02/marcus/sevenliberalartsandsciences.htm
CHAPTER SEVEN
Love of Adventure
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee, Jr. - "High Flight"
There's a type of love that scales mountains, moves rivers, and changes worlds. This sort of love often breaks up families, ruins careers, and ends in destitution and death.
Yet it keeps luring people into its web, offering the chance of rewards beyond compare in emotional satisfaction, lifelong relationships, and worldly riches. This love is the Love of Adventure.
Since the first hominids dropped down from the trees to explore the savannahs, we humans have distinguished ourselves by a desire to know what's around the corner, “over the hills and far away”, and even beyond the stars.
The Defining Myth
The Odyssey – one of the most popular adventure stories ever. The saga tells of the Greek warrior Odysseus’ ten year journey back home to Ithaca from the fall of Troy. Having come up with the Trojan Horse, Odysseus annoyed some of the gods participating in the outcome of that ten year battle between the Greeks and the Trojans. Poseidon in particular used his sea god powers to cast Odysseus and his men hither and yon on foreign shores where they faced all sorts of challenges, loss and rewards.
Read Homer’s entire Iliad and Odyssey to get lots of ideas for stories you can write dealing with these same issues. Some note that the journeys of Odysseus can be aligned with the chakras.
Exemplar Movies
Indiana Jones – all four films (the Crystal Skulls one not so much, but...) plus the excellent TV series, Young Indiana Jones.
Why it exists (evolutionary back-story)
Given that every human begins as a single fertilized cell and then expands and grows and becomes more complex, there is a deep evolutionary drive to expand and grow. It is how we are created in the first place. Anthropologically, we human primates managed to get our knuckles off the ground some aeons ago and now we are trying to grab the stars.
The search for new resources often compels primitive tribes to explore new lands looking for fresh water, flora and fauna. Thank goodness for the survival of the species that almost every group has a few members driven to explore the wilds. Once the new frontiers are conquered, civilizing forces start moving in. Lots
of American Westerns are about this very process: the drive to find new resources for the “tribe” and the tribe moving in and settling down, changing the system where cowboy law had once ruled.
How it works (physiology & psychology)
An explanation from the fine website Science Daily addresses the physiology of the Love of Adventure thusly: “Dopamine is a natural chemical which relays messages in the brain controlling aspects of movement, cognition and behaviour. It helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centres and regulates emotional responses such as fear.” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111104102125.htm
Science has identified the biochemistry for risk tolerance, not surprisingly a very strong factor in those we label “adrenalin junkies”. There are indeed some people who just crave the thrill. Perhaps you know someone who does or perhaps you yourself like to ride scary roller coasters? Watch horror-suspense movies? White-water raft? Rock climb? Bungee-jump? Do Mixed Martial Arts? Swim with sharks? An understanding of the addictive power of adrenalin and the basic physiology that craves adrenalin will help you write these characters with more insight.
In Star Trek the infant James Tiberius Kirk is born in a bath of adrenalin as the starship evacuates. His mom is in labor as his dad dies sacrificing his life to save the crew. What a compelling chemical beginning to a life of adventure.
Sexually speaking, females tend to be drawn to adventurous Alpha Males. For breeding purposes anyway. They also typically settle down and raise families with Beta Males. This tendency is evident in birds and mammals of all sorts, including humans. The premise is that the Alpha Males have healthy adventurous disease-free genes and that’s exactly what you want to propagate the species. Unfortunately they do not typically make good mates or fathers and for that you need the Beta Males. It’s a system that has worked for millennia to further the survival of many, many species.
Proof in humans is that ten percent of children are fathered by other than their mother’s official mate. Think what great story complications you could weave from just this concept.
There is a sense of aloneness and sometimes alienation in the soul of an adventurer because others cannot truly understand them if they are not adventurers themselves.
How it serves us now
Civilizations rise and fall. Much of that is dependent upon local resources such as water, arable soil, plants and animals. When that changes, everything changes. Then the person with the drive for adventure can lead you out of danger and destruction and into a new “promised land”. Post-apocalyptic stories have protagonists that are physically and often also emotionally and socially adventurous, as in The Hunger Games, Road Warrior(s), The Postman, Waterworld, and Avatar.
Currently our planet is suffering from the ravages of “extraction capitalism”, which tends to take what it wants regardless of consequences. The consequences of these current actions may one day force us deeper into the earth and the seas, or off-planet in search of new resources. In your stories a protagonist with a sense of adventure might well save the human race.
Examples in Myth and Legend
How many adventure stories begin with the young man or woman setting out to “seek their fortune”? Lots. Remember that in feudal societies it was typical for the first son to inherit the estate. The second son went into the military. The third son joined the Church. The fourth son and any beyond that were pretty much on their own. Typically they went on to seek their fortune in strange lands among exotic people. Sometimes that worked really well. Sometimes they were never heard from again.
The Mesopotamian saga of Gilgamesh and Enkidu is full of adventure as they search for the secret to immortality, battling scorpion men, and diving to the bottom of the sea.
Jason and the Argonauts have nothing but adventure.
The legend of King Solomon’s Mines lost somewhere in Africa have drawn adventurers for thousands of years, including in the film Congo.
A sense of adventure carried the Maori thousands of miles across the Pacific to Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud [New Zealand].
The majority of women in mythologies are goddesses, typically the earth mother or lover archetypes...not adventuresses. However there are a few exceptions.
Greco-Roman adventuress Atalanta went on the great Calydonian boar hunt with the guys, was the swiftest runner in the land, and some stories say she accompanied Jason and the Argonauts on the quest for the Golden Fleece.
Artemis/Diana was goddess of the hunt and Lady of Wild Things. Orion was her huntsman for awhile, but he ended up a constellation. In the seige of Troy, Artemis favored the Trojans.
The Norse Valkyries were adventurous warrior virgins who gathered slain heroes from a battlefield and carried them on their horses up to Valhalla, the warrior heaven.
We need more stories of adventurous women...perhaps you will write them.
Examples in History and Current Events
In the 13th century Marco Polo left Italy for the Far East, allegedly traversing the Silk Road, learning about the locals, and bringing back knowledge and goods from China and places between. Regardless of whether he actually made all those journeys, his writings have inspired tens of thousands of people to go on their own adventures.
The Chinese Admiral Zheng He used navigation technology in the 1400s to explore the world beyond the South China Sea. Besides Malaya, Java, Indonesia, and India he was also reputed to have explored Madagascar and the Horn of Africa.
Ferdinand Magellan and Captain Cook sailed from Europe through the Strait of Magellan at the bottom of South America, where the difference between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans is forty feet, creating dangerous, turbulent waters. Charles Darwin sailed through the Strait on the Beagle, eventually to visit the Galapagos Islands and find further validation for his theory of evolution. President Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet went through on its show-of-power mission. Every voyage from the Atlantic to the Pacific was in those days a great adventure.
Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez was on a mission from the Catholic God (via the Pope) who sent him to the New World. He burned the boats they came in to ensure his men would stay and fight for the Church, the glory of God, and the gold. Other conquistadors also left their mark, their genes, their language, and their ways in the forever-altered “New World”.
Admiral Bird, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackleton were polar explorers whose exploits still stir the imagination.
British explorer Captain James Cook, sailing the South Pacific on his ship Endeavor, said he wanted to "Go farther than any man has been before me...as far as I think it is possible for a man to go”.
Sir Richard Francis Burton located the source of the Nile and translated the 1001 Arabian Nights for fascinated and scandalized Europeans.
Stephens and Catherwood discovered long-lost cities in Mezo and South America.
Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt spent a year on safar hunting wild game in Africa and wrote an excellent book about it.
In 1953 Sir Edmund Hilary was the first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest, accompanied by his friend and Sherpa guide, Tenzing Norgay.
Alexandra David Neel was the first white woman into Lhasa, Tibet.
http://alphababeacademy.com/alphababe/alexandra-david-neel/
Gertrude Bell – writer, traveler, archaeologist, and spy in the Middle East
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Bell
Airplane fighter pilots and test pilots break new frontiers, from Charles Lindberg to Amelia Earhart, Chuck Yaeger, and the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo crews who led the way to the moon. From that program came the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station, and continuing exploration into the solar system and beyond.
Some other female explorers and adventurers are:
Harriet Quimby – aviatrix
Freya Stark – explorer, linguist, and designer of propaganda for the British in WWII
Tereshkova, Valentina - first woman in space
Kin
gsley, Mary Henrietta - explorer
Johnson, Osa - explorer, filmmaker
Boyd, Louise Arner - Arctic explorer
Bishop, Isabella Lucy Bird - first woman elected to Royal Geographic Society
Grace O’Malley - 16th century Irish pirate
Beryl Markham - aviator/explorer
Doctors without Borders and the Peace Corps -- both are a combination of the desire to do good coupled with a sense of adventure.
“For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest sleeping in the unplowed ground., Is our world gone? We say “Farewell.” Is a new world coming? We welcome it – and we will bend it to the hopes of man.” Lyndon B. Johnson, U.S. President
Some Hollywood legends were particularly adventurous when it came to racing: James Dean, Steve McQueen (who did his own stunts in the Bullitt car chase), and Paul Newman.
Many sports are adventurous – bungee jumping, sky diving, scuba diving, aerobatics, snowboarding, surfing, spelunking, mountain claiming– and engage the extremes of the environment.
Some jobs are by nature adventurous – spying is one that offers all sorts of possibilities for adventure. Special forces troops must be adventurous by nature, and certainly are that by training.
Show Me the Love! Page 8
