{"id":68422,"date":"2025-10-22T20:41:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T18:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=68422"},"modified":"2025-10-23T19:54:52","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T17:54:52","slug":"the-beauty-of-human-centeredness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/the-beauty-of-human-centeredness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beauty of Human Centeredness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On September 16, 2025, at the age of 90, Robert Redford, perhaps the last Hollywood icon, died. What made his acting so great?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One of his last films, All Is Lost<\/em>, is something of a legacy for the great actor Robert Redford. He plays a lone sailor in the Indian Ocean, fighting for survival. Except for a few quiet curses and an attempted SOS using the broken radio, the blond actor remains silent for 100 minutes. What speaks in the silence is his gaze. In theater, posture and gestures are significant; in film, it is the eyes. Redford looks at the clouds, the rigging, the compass, and then inward as he tastes what little fresh water he has left. How much a look can convey, especially when it seeks nothing but is in dialogue! \u201cI’m sorry\u201d is the first sentence we hear in the film, read from the farewell letter he finally writes. Perhaps many great artists have this sentence on their lips as their legacy: equipped with incredible talent for an entire generation, maybe they feel that there could have been more than the immeasurable amount they have given. What a story: the sailor loses his boat, loses his life raft, loses the strength to keep swimming, and then, from the depths of the water, sees the lights of a rescue boat above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lonely in Company<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Redford is alone in All Is Lost<\/em>, but this is true of many of his films, even when he is surrounded by other people. In the film adaptation of Karen Blixen’s novel Out of Africa<\/em>, he plays a wild adventurer who can\u2019t be held back by Meryl Streep. In Indecent Proposal<\/em>, he is a billionaire who can buy anything but remains solitary. This aloneness carries a certain grandeur in Redford’s portrayals. Consider the popular 1998 film The Horse Whisperer<\/em>. Thirteen-year-old Grace and her horse are seriously injured by a truck. Grace\u2019s lower leg has to be amputated. Mother, daughter, and horse travel halfway across the continent to visit the reclusive horse therapist, played by Redford.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Film critics may dismiss the story as a superficial romance, but there are sequences in it that have touched the hearts of millions of people with their profound insight into the human soul, like the moment when Redford encounters the battered horse in the paddock: he kneels\u2014a single shot that says more than a thousand words. And then it\u2019s his gaze, which moves from the wounds on the four-legged animal’s trembling coat up to the animal’s eyes. This is followed by a second lesson: he can only help the horse if the owner, young Grace, supports him. The mother wants to intervene, but Redford stops her: it is up to the girl to decide, because after all, she will ride the horse again later. The girl, caught up in self-pity, rebuffs him. \u201cDo you have a problem helping me?\u201d Looking at her prosthetic leg, she adds, \u201cIsn’t it obvious?\u201d \u201cNot to me,\u201d replies the horse and youth whisperer. When the mother tries to intervene again, he remains steady, \u201cWith all due respect, that’s Grace’s decision.\u201d Once again, it’s the look in his eyes: he challenges and encourages the girl, helping her to overcome her trauma and heal the relationship between daughter and mother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Always on Equal Footing<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Status plays a major role in drama\u2014it\u2019s the power imbalance between two characters. Who influences whom? What Rudolf Steiner calls \u201cthe positive and negative human being\u201d or what J\u00f6rgen Smit distinguishes as \u201cwax and rubber people,\u201d is high and low status in theater. In Robert Redford’s acting, this choreographed system of oppression and openness, of dominance and inferiority, is not at work. When he dominates in a role, he remains receptive; when he plays the loser, he retains his dignity. Somehow, the interaction is always on equal footing. How does that happen? Some film obituaries featured a scene from one of his early films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid<\/em>, where the two bandits are on the run and must jump from a cliff into the water. Redford hesitates and then admits, \u201cI can’t swim.\u201d Strength in weakness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This coexistence of strong and weak, confident and lost, masculine and feminine is probably what makes his characters on screen so deeply human. There is always a centeredness, a middle ground, and at its core lies a high degree of credibility. It is therefore not surprising that Robert Redford established his own academy for young artists and championed the protection of nature and minorities. Although Redford’s performances in the more than 100 film productions in which he has appeared may stray far from the center for dramatic reasons, thanks to his acting, which gracefully combines spiritual contrasts, they are at the same time lessons in the beauty of human centeredness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Story isn\u2019t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.\u2014Robert McKee<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Translation <\/strong>Laura Liska
Image <\/strong>Robert Redford campaigns against the demolition of the Santa Monica Pier during the filming of The Sting<\/em>, 1973. Source: Ken Dare, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On September 16, 2025, at the age of 90, Robert Redford, perhaps the last Hollywood icon, died. What made his acting so great? One of his last films, All Is Lost, is something of a legacy for the great actor Robert Redford. He plays a lone sailor in the Indian Ocean, fighting for survival. Except for a few quiet curses and an attempted SOS using the broken radio, the blond actor remains silent for 100 minutes. What speaks in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9159,"featured_media":68307,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9097,10939],"tags":[11711,11712,8824],"class_list":["post-68422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-obituary","tag-ausgabe-42-2025-en","tag-english-issue-43-2025","tag-spotlights"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}