Edward Hopper at the Movies
by Laley Lippard

Born in 1882 to a shopkeeper in Nyack, New York State, Edward Hopper is considered among the 20th Century's most important visual artists. Hinting at America's dark underbelly, his trademark shadows add unease even to pictures of sunny New England countryside. Small-town shop parades are loaded with dark corners, peaceful gas stations are overlooked by jet-black forests.

A great Hopper painting is all stillness, silence, solidity. He paints the hiatus, the lapse, the space between, the moment before or after significant moments. A man staring out of the window while a girl sleeps beside him. A woman seated in the dead light of a theatre during intermission. It is pared to the bare epiphany. Elimination, rearrangement, cropping, distancing, angle: it’s usual to think of Hopper in terms of cinematography.

Hopper loved the cinema. As a result, his paintings sometimes look like movie sets. His exploration of the etching medium in the late 1910s forced him to concentrate on composition, light, and subject, since color was not an option. His work as a graphic illustrator led him to believe that the simplest pictures are the most powerful. He once commented, “When I don’t feel in the mood for painting,” he said, “I go to the movies for a week or more. I go on a regular movie binge.” Hopper’s love was returned by successive generations of filmmakers looking to his distinctly American images and to the palpable loneliness of his paintings for stylistic inspiration.

Hopper had a particular affinity with the great noir films of the 1940s. This was also the genre upon which his influence is mainly felt. Hopper’s greatest contribution to film noir was the manner in which he was able to render, in color, the contrasts between light and dark. He was a master of sunlight, animating dark shadows, using a broader and more vibrant palette of greens and yellows.

For Forces of Evil (1948), Abraham Polonsky took his gifted cinematographer, George Barnes, to an exhibition of Hopper’s paintings and said: “That’s what I want this picture to look like” and indeed it did.

The haunting image of the motel in the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho combined the sinister verticality of Hopper’s mansard-roofed house in his first acclaimed painting House by the Railroad (1925) with the placid horizontality of his numerous paintings of motels.

The same image of the isolated mansard-topped mansion had been used earlier by George Stevens in Giant and was later drawn on by Terrence Malick for Days of Heaven. The same house had also inspired Charles Addams as the residence of the rather psychotic Addams Family.

Norman Mailer, an admirer of Hopper, preceded his only mainstream movie, Tough Guys Don't Dance, with a montage of Hopper houses and lighthouses on the New England coast.

The great British production designer Ken Adam scrupulously reproduced Hopper’s Nighthawks and New York Movie for the film Pennies From Heaven (1981). Wim Wenders’ Californian evocation of Nighthawks in The End of Violence (1997) stunned audiences.

More recently, Sam Mendes turned to Hopper for the dark interiors and the forlorn look of Depression-era America in Road to Perdition. The final shot of the seemingly unoccupied and pristine house by the lake which, as the viewer knows, bears the burden of a terrible tragedy, is inspired by the seductive innocence of the seaside and lakeside houses that Hopper painted throughout his career.

Nighthawk by Edward Hopper
A scene from Pennies from Heaven

House by the Railroad by Edward Hopper
The infamous hotel from the Hitchcock classic Psycho