Imogen Wethered – 18th November 2011

Art direction and the sublime

This week we were shown the most horrifying Cabwise advert, it shows a girl’s head thrown against a car window with the most chillingly terrified and anguished expression on her face. It is through the effectiveness of this advert and the fear and emotions that it evokes, that I would like to discuss why I feel the 18th Century theory of the sublime can be an incredibly powerful tool for art direction for this type of advert. Though the girls face in this advert is horrifying, it is actually the fact that the majority of this advert is obscured in complete blackness that truly enables it to evoke horrified emotions within its viewer. The ad in fact shows us very little, instead it leaves the most horrific parts to our deepest internal thoughts and emotions, and we even frighten ourselves with what we imagine to be beyond that depth.

This my friends is the sublime!

In 1757 Edmund Burke published a treatise on aesthetics called A philosophical Enquiry into our ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. In this treatise he explains that the sublime is the most powerful emotion known to man and that this is because it incredibly internal and deeply routed within a subjects inner subjective ideas. Burke said that to make anything sublime ‘obscurity seems to be a necessary’. This is because depicting a tangible representation of something terrifying makes it less so because the horror is then externalized, it is therefore us to see not therefore us to imagine. Imagine this Cabwise advert had been a lot more blatant about what could be going in on inside the cab…would it have the same effect on us? No, it would look silly and also far less severe. The reason that the ad causes such trauma to our thoughts is because its obscure darkness causes the advert to become routed in our deeply internalized ideas. It causes us to play out the story of the advert in our own minds, though we may desperately try to stop it doing so. It is an incredibly powerful advert that evokes a confusion of emotions and thoughts that we try to resist, yet at the same time the advert also causes us to feel a sense of relief and security as we take comfort in the fact that we are safe from the situation that the scene is stirring up within our thoughts. This again is another key element of the sublime, or what Burke defines as a ‘delightful horror’. Though the idea is so very far from delightful we are still reassured with enormous relief that we are safe from this terrifying scene.

So I think the use of Burke’s sublime and dark obscurity is an incredibly powerful tactic in the art direction for adverts like this. I ultimately think that it makes this ad incredibly powerful and effective because the obscured scene in the avert becomes incredibly internalized by the audiences inner ideas and emotions,  causing them to really pay attention to the dangers that can exist in our world.

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