They blew it up!
Do you remember this scene?
Charlton Heston rides up the shore and then suddenly, the shadow comes over him.
It’s the Statue of Liberty
Planet of the Apes!
The final scene.
Even now, it sends shivers up my spine.
That’s iconography!
That’s what makes the movie stick in my head 43 years after its release.
(43 years! Excuse me while I go kill myself)
OK, I’m back.
Yeah. 43 years later that image still has the same power it did in 1968 when I saw it for the first time.
Just like this one:
Star Wars – opening scene
or this one, a bit older:
The Creation – by Michelangelo
All three of these have the same thing in common – they are powerful show stoppers.
They have become iconographic.
They reach out through the screen (or the ceiling) and grab the viewer by the throat and say ‘hey – pay attention’.
When Michelangelo painted The Creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel there weren’t that many other images competing for people’s attention. There were some. There were other painters to be sure. But the works of Benvenuto Cellini (who was, by the way, no slouch) don’t grab us in the way that Michelangelo’s did and still do.
Even when Planet of the Apes was made in 1968, the media landscape, although a good deal more crowded than in 1511 when Michelangelo was ceiling painting, was still relatively empty. There were 3 TV networks and your average Hollywood studio released about a dozen pictures a year.
Now, needless to say, all has changed.
We are awash in visual stimulation – 56 billion videos on Youtube and we’re just getting started.
If you want to make videos, how do you ‘break through the clutter’?
We’re going to be talking about that this afternoon at 5PM on our live webcast – and taking questions.
So tune to www.nyvs.com at 5pm and and find out.
