Zombie Walk Propaganda, Redux
As much as like our first poster, I decided to supplement it with a work of my own. I went for a more classic propaganda look...
Here's the original poster on which this was based. I decided to keep the Zeppelins. What do Zeppelins have to do with Zombies and/or Silver Spring? They are all awesome.
(I promise not every post between now and October 24th will be about the Zombie Walk.)
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5 comments:
Ahh, constructivism… A great movement, one of my favorites, have studied at great lengths…The bold colors and striking angles probably did more for poster design than any other movement could have… Suppose that's why it keeps making the postmodern rounds as the voice of propaganda as art/art as propaganda messages…
Hmmm...you know what they say about zombies....the bigger the zeppelin (or theatre sign)....
I think it looks too much like the zombie is giving a "Heil Hitler" salute. Zeppelins, after all, were were mostly built and used by Germans/Germany -- including for bombing raids in WWI. They were named after their inventor, German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, and the Hindenburg was named after the President of Germany, Paul von Hindenburg.
I know the model for the poster has Lenin, but no one is going to know that -- especially with the zeppelins. I like the look otherwise, but you need to move that arm down.
Sure, but really they are "airships", which the Russians did have. Calling them Zeppelins is simply like calling tissues Kleenex because it sounds better.
Besides, Nazi Zombies are the best kind of zombies. What's more evil than that?
I do agree that zombie-Lenin appears to be heiling someone or other. For better or for worse, that has to be taken in the context of the aesthetics of constructivism. Seeing Lenin in such a pose is just as awkward, really. But the aesthetics of constructivism call for straight lines, and hard angles. This includes poses of people - mouths wide open, arms straight out, I bet you could even find a goose-step or two. While I see the validity and the artistic reasoning behind it, I also see it as a practical problem - the heil salute is so recognizable, that people won't see a pose like this as anything but.
Airship is a hypernym of hyponyms such as zeppelin, blimp. The airships in the picture have clear rigid skeletons, which we generically refer to today as zeppelins. So if you want to be as pedantic as possible, it seems that they are clearly "zeppelins."
Saying that zeppelin = Germany is fine. But saying that Germany = Nazism is not so fine. I don't think Mike was actively trying to say that, but he made kind of a mush out of his statement, and it ended up that way.
Graf von Zeppelin realized the military importance of aircraft, and saw potential in rigid balloons. Graf von Zeppelin was a German, but not a Nazi, and I don't think he could have foreseen how German politics were going to play out after his death. It's easy, but not logical, to go ahead and associate Zeppelins with Nazism. It's easy because the Zeppelin itself had such a short lifespan - one goes up in flames, and suddenly nobody wants anything to do with them. Such a short life, spanning such a terrible era makes the association simple. We don't associate planes with Nazism (unless, say, they're emblazoned with swastikas), because planes have managed to stay commonplace.
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