The artistic debt Wim Wenders owes to Edward Hopper
The German director Wim Wenders has a truly unique visual consideration when it comes to his highly aesthetically pleasing films. He’s known for several widely acclaimed cinematic works, including the documentaries Buena Vista Social Club, Pina and The Salt of the Earth.
Wenders has also delivered significant efforts to the realm of the narrative film, particularly his 1984 drama Paris, Texas, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and his 1987 romantic fantasy Wings of Desire, which again saw the filmmaker receive an accolade at Cannes, that time taking home the ‘Best Director’ award.
While Wenders is recognised for his contribution to the world of European cinema, he’s also done his fair bit for American film too, and when we consider the slice of Americana that the German director serves up in a few choice movies, it’s clear to see the influence of on the most significant American artists of all time, Edward Hopper.
Hopper was primarily known for his beautiful oil-based paintings that depicted a stark realism in the lives of everyday Americans. There’s a deep dramatic quality to his visual portrayals of the urban and suburban areas of the United States, including his most famous works, 1939’s New York Movie and 1942’s Nighthawks.
In his 2015 book The Pixels of Paul Cézanne: And Reflections on Other Artists, Wenders explained his deep fascination with Hopper and how it explores the very nature of America, something that the director himself is wont to do throughout his wildly impressive and visually intoxicated filmography.
“Each picture digs deep into the American Dream and investigates that very American dilemma of appearance versus reality,” Wenders told Another Man Magazine. Hopper’s paintings indeed portray somewhat isolated figures in typically American settings whilst putting forth the notion that they ought to be happy in their surroundings, yet evidently are not.
“[He] continually reinvented the story of lonely people in empty rooms or couples who live separate lives together without speaking,” Wenders added. “In the background are the impenetrable façades of a hostile town or an equally unapproachable landscape. And always windows! Outside and inside are the same inhospitable and unreal living spaces, radiating a similar sense of strangeness.”
For proof of Hopper’s influence on Wenders, we don’t need to look further than his first film made in America, 1982’s Hammett, the neo-noir mystery based on the Joe Gores novel of the same name. In telling of the detective writer Dashiell Hammett finding himself in a mystery of his own, Wenders delivers a noir aesthetic very obviously in line with some of Hopper’s early drawings and the chiaroscuro of light meets dark.
As well as 1977’s The American Friend and 2006’s Don’t Come Knocking, Wenders is notably unashamed of his Hopper influence in 1997’s The End of Violence, starring Bill Pullman, Andie McDowell and Gabriel Byrne. In fact, the film actually recreates the diner scene from Hopper’s Nighthawks, only giving a definitive narrative arc, unlike the one that’s left to the viewer’s imagination in the original painting.
Wenders had also paid direct tribute to Hopper in an immersive 3D film art installation called Two or Three Things I Know About Edward Hopper, in which he recreated some of Hopper’s most famous scenes in little fictional cinema narrative moments of his own, offering up versions of the likes of Hopper’s 1947 painting Summer Evening 1952’s work Morning Sun, to name but two.
But the most significant and most evident connection between Hopper and Wenders arrives in Paris, Texas, starring Harry Dean Stanton as a formerly reclusive figure who stumbles out of the desert to find the family he previously abandoned. Wenders’ 1984 effort (arguably his best) details several classic Americana locations, including late-night diners and gas stations.
So, too, does Stanton’s character personify the kind of lonely figures we find within Hopper’s works. There’s a beautiful visual design in Paris, Texas, that’s undoubtedly a homage to Hopper and throughout Wenders’ impressive filmography, it’s clear that he was indebted to the legendary American art icon.
See some examples of the inspiration below.
