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Nighthawks at the dentist’s

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American realist artist, Edward Hopper, got a couple of mentions on Mikethep’s Vermeer thread this week. To take just one example, Tom Waits’s live album Night Hawks at the Diner is named after his most famous painting.

This morning, as I sat down in the dentist’s chair, Ed suddenly made another appearance. The dentist always has the radio on in the surgery, and today there was an excellent programme on Hopper’s enormous influence, not least on the cinematic arts. While she worked on my teeth, I lay there and learnt more about Mr H.

Hopper was a keen cinema goer and he inspired many directors. The house in Psycho, many of the scenes in Siodmak’s The Killers, Boorman’s hard-as-nails gangster thriller Point Blank: all owe a great debt to his paintings.

Philip French wrote an excellent piece on this: see Comments.

Less predictably, that marvel of Swedish cinema, Roy Anderson, who was interviewed for the programme, was rapid to acknowledge his debt to Hopper:

“These paintings are condensed, purified—what isn’t necessary for the picture is subtracted—as in cartoons. I try to reach that level of concentration.”

Predictably, my question to you is: which other artists, photographers, comic book writers can you think of that have had a significant effect on the visual style of certain movies?
Greenaway’s love of pastiches, the recent Dr Strange movie which revelled in its homage to Steve Ditko and the Vermeeresque Girl with the Pearl Earring are the first things that come to my mind.

Anything you can think of?

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Comments

  3. Excellent! Altman did a nice job there. Shooting very much on the hoof and very spontaneously, he’s almost the exact opposite of Roy Andersson who constructs his images meticulously and prefers to work in the studio. In the radio interview I listened to, Andersson mentioned how he would browse through books of painting to look for inspiration for scenes in his movies.

    I cannot imagine Bergman doing TV ads but they saved RA’s career when his films were not doing so well. And each of them is a small, quirky, amusing gem.

    There are at least five AWers who understand Swedish, so here is a link to that radio programme.

    http://sverigesradio.se/sida/default.aspx?programid=2794

  5. Bronzino! He sounds more like sun tan lotion than a Renaissance master but he sure could paint.

    You’re right though. In fact there can be few directors who have joyously plundered art history as much as Terry Gilliam.

  7. The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman was inspired by the church paintings of Albertus Pictor in Täby Kyrka – Death playing chess with a knight being the most famous one, Death leading the dance at the end is another, the actor in the tree with Death sawing his branch off as well, I believe. A role inspired by Albertus is in the film too, but under another name (Jöns? Jens?) IIRC.

  9. Remarkable what one discovers, once one starts to dig around. I did not know that Fellini started his career as a newspaper cartoonist and had a life-long fascination with the comic strips he read as a child.

    https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2011/07/01/cartoon_flights_of_fancy_inspired_fellini.html

    Let’s not forget H R Giger’s enormous contribution to Alien.

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/14/hr-giger-film-artist-alien-i-am-afraid-of-my-visions

    • Fellini wrote the introduction for Volume 1 of Steranko’s History of Comics and scripted Trip To Tuluum, drawn by Milo Manara, which appeared in the last issues of UK’s Crisis magazine.

      And IIRC Stan Lee took some months off around 1971 to write a film script for Alan Resnais (provisionally called Monster, it was never produced).

  12. Thanks Locust and Sniffity. You two are mines of fascinating info. (Hangs head in shame.) I haven’t seen the movie yet, Locust. I will though.

    I had to find out more about Trip to Tulum and discovered this review. It seems that Fellini was a great fan and friend of mystic Peruvian writer, Carlos Castaneda, (very popular in the 60s) and that the two of them made a visit to Yucatan to look for possible locations.

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/990042.Trip_to_Tulum

    Resnais and Stan Lee was another revelation.

    http://www.slashfilm.com/trivia-french-visionary-alain-resnais-planned-two-films-marvels-stan-lee/

    Imagine a Spiderman movie directed by the Last Year in Marienbad Hitmaker!

  13. A few years back we had a thread on films that were based on comics and graphic novels from which I made this IMDB list. There were a lot and I’m sure there are many we missed.

    http://www.imdb.com/list/ls058569505/

    I just added Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets which I saw this summer. Another director who has had a lifelong love of comics producing a film which was a homage to the characters which he grew up with.

    Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières’s Valerian and Laureline comics, which started in 1967, are a great French institution (the Gallic answer to Dan Dare?). The visual style of Star Wars was greatly influenced by them, a debt that was never really acknowledged by George Lucas. Mézières got his revenge by drawing a scene where Leia and Skywalker met his characters.

    “Fancy meeting you here.”

    “Oh we’ve been hanging around here for a long time.”

    https://kitbashed.com/blog/valerian-and-laureline?fref=gc&dti=1574166589558789

    The movie got lukewarm reviews but my son (14) and I thoroughly enjoyed it and he is not easy to please.

  14. I was just looking through the new programme for our local cinema, and one of the films seems tailormade for this thread: Loving Vincent It is an animated version of the Van Gogh life history including animated versions of his paintings.

    The trailer looks intriguing, although it has not convinced me that it is a must-see.

  15. Sad news today that Hasse Alfredsson (Picasso’s dad in my clip above, and of course co-writer of this and many other films) has died, 86 years old.
    Here’s the clip of the long and wonderful speech he gave when he received his honorary guldbagge – includes a wonderful anecdote about Louis Armstrong and his band!

    And this Hasse&Tage classic is just as funny today as it was back then:

    RIP

  17. A 1616 painting by the Dutch artist Frans Hals, A Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Civic Guard Company, dominates Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.

  18. Thanks Tigger. Greenaway is an interesting chap and loves to come out with controversial opinions.

    “I always think, and this is probably a very unpopular thing to say, that all film writers should be shot. We do not need a text-based cinema … we need an image-based cinema.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/14/film-director-calls-for-image-based-cinema

    Don’t know much about Hals but he is up there with those other flying Dutchmen, Rembrandt and Vermeer, according to this informative article. But has Jonathan Richmond written a song about him??

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/08/08/haarlem-shuffle

  19. To my shame, I had not heard of Len Wein, @Sniffity. You are filling in lots of gaps in my knowledge! I see that, like Jack Kirby, he worked for both DC and then Marvel. John Romita was also involved in the creation of Wolverine: a name that rings bells.

    I had heard of Hans Alfredson of course, @Locust. But I was pretty gobsmacked at the reaction to his death.

    View post on imgur.com

    The entire front page of DN! (The main morning paper here in Stockholm). Clearly he meant a lot to a large number of people.
    When I think Hasse & Tage, I think of Monica Zetterlund.

    Not necessarily as a rose!

    A mighty meeting of talents!

    • With the exception of the younger generations I’d say that all Swedes LOVE “Hasseåtage”, and Hasse’s death (and Gösta Ekman’s earlier this year) shuts the door on that era of comedy; equal parts political satire and absurd silliness. Not all of it stands up today, but most of it actually do (but it helps if you know and remember the well-known people and issues of that time…)
      They did so much, for a very long time; radio shows, comedy revues, films, albums, books; they wrote and acted and directed and they made us laugh more than any other comedians (and cry a little as well, when they did serious stuff!) Their films are among the ones I’ve seen the most times in the cinema, going back again and again and following the film when it moved from cinema to cinema, and seeing it again some years later when some cinema picked it up for a re-run (remember when they used to do that, just a year or two after the original release? Before the VHS and DVD and streaming…) I can quote tons of lines from everything they did, and sing the lyrics to lots of their songs (and I’m notoriously bad at remembering lyrics).
      I only saw them live in the theatre once, unfortunately, for Fröken Fleggmans Mustasch. I still have the handkerchief that the program was printed on so you could blow your nose in case the play moved you to tears (of laughter). 🙂
      Hasseåtage is our Monty Python, but better (oh yes, I said it…)

  22. Thanks Nick.
    That was a major oversight.

    Your comment got me looking for other sources of visual inspiration he had.

    Often it was other films. Last year in Marienbad for the Shining and Matsumoto’s Funeral parade of roses (1969) for A clockwork orange.
    I suspect not many of us have seen that: an innovative look at the Tokyo gay and tranvestite scene which reworks the
    Myth of Oedipus.

    http://illusion.scene360.com/movies/72675/stanley-kubrick-film-inspirations/

    • I’d recommend getting hold of the blu-ray edition of Barry Lyndon, assuming you have a player. Kubrick insisted on using only natural light for the interiors, so the modern technology really brings them into sharper focus.

      • Sadly I do not have a Blu Ray, Nick. But I will keep an eye open for a screening at Filmhuset here. Or maybe even try and persuade my local art house fleapit to do a screening in the future.

        I seem to remember that the critical reception at the time was lukewarm. Time for a reevaluation!

  23. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari clearly would not look the way it does if not for modernist painting. Expressionism and also cubism are the inspiration, well cubism begat expressionism anyway. There is no one artist behind the look of the film. Maybe a bit of Ernst Kirchner, and Picasso and Braque for the odd perspectives and distorted forms.

    • It seems that Picasso and Braque were themselves very influenced by early cinema. They were movie nuts.

      https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/arts/design/15kenn.html

      “Friends like Salmon and the early film writer and critic Maurice Raynal also wrote of their frequent trips with “la bande à Picasso,” which included the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, to the movie screens scattered through Montmartre and other neighborhoods beginning around 1908, when Picasso and Braque became close, and cinema was exploding. Everyone seemed to be bitten by the bug; in 1909 Dublin’s first movie house was established by a little-known writer named James Joyce.

      The things Picasso’s gang watched were much less like what we think of as movies than like an early, sprocketed vision of the Internet: wildly diverse, usually short scenes of pratfalls, magic tricks, bawdy dancers, cowboys, menageries, exotic locales, airplane stunts and hallucinatory special-effects experiments.”

      • There was also a segment in the 1967 Casino Royale where the daughter of Sir James Bond and Mata Hari visits an au pair agency in Berlin which is really a training school for spies….it’s all done Dr Caligari style with odd angles in abundance.

          • I’d never heard of that! Dutch angle or Dutch tilt, a technique used to make the viewer feel uneasy by tilting the camera.

            There is a lot of it in The Third Man.

            I did find another clip where a large sock-like creature called Bingo explained it. But there so many profanities that I went for this instead.

        • The appearance of Lady Penelope and her Mondrian outfit, rubbing shoulders with Dali, Braque and Kubrick on this thread, has brightened my day no end.

          I found it! Mata Bond in Berlin.

          What a deeply bonkers film that was. They threw in everything including several kitchen sinks and a small army of Bonds.

  24. Very true, Diddley. Those German silent films tend to be visually stunning, and rather than going back to old masters they were being inspired by art going on at the time. (Sticking my neck out there, I don’t know so much about that era).

    Just stumbled across this discussion on Mubi which covers a lot of bases

    https://mubi.com/lists/painters-and-films

    And this IMDB list of films about artists covers far more than the usual suspects.

    http://www.imdb.com/list/ls050659072/

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