Special art in a special building in an unusual environment: It is no coincidence that Wim Wenders is showing his short film “Two Or Three Things I Know About Edward Hopper” in the Bastian Gallery in Dahlem. The “Himmel über Berlin” director can stage his poetic work particularly skilfully here.
The film could easily be longer, it’s so wonderful when Wim Wenders’ pictures learn to walk. The gas station attendant, the couple in the car, the young people on the porch, in the hotel, the landscapes – everything is as Edward Hopper could have painted it. The photos, which already speak for themselves and are extremely lively, although they show scenes of a rather boring everyday life, captivate the viewer.
All the more so when the images then become short, wordless stories in the film. One follows the protagonists meditatively, understands them, likes them, doesn’t like them, but is mostly simply fascinated by how they fit into the 3D environment or disappear again. Like ghosts that weren’t called.
This “Two Or Three Things I Know About Edward Hopper”, i.e. these two or three things that Wim Wenders could have learned from this great artist, could be casualness, this calm, this normal, which has become postcard motifs and which spring from the pen of one of the best, most popular and most expensive artists of the recent past.
But the word poetry is particularly important to Wenders, as he reveals in an interview, and: “It’s the light that fascinates me most about Hopper and also shapes me. I took ‘Fire Chief’ in this twilight, in which the shadows are always get longer. It’s the light that glorifies cinema characters.” The filmmaker believes 3D is a highly poetic medium that has great power to draw viewers in because it has been shown to involve very different brain regions than viewing in 2D.
Wenders believes that the 3D image as such has an affinity for poetry, which, however, has remained largely unknown as a phenomenon. “3D is actually only used in spectacular films,” the 77-year-old regrets, but emphasizes the thoroughly poetic nature of James Cameron’s latest 3D work “Avatar”. “Otherwise Cameron wouldn’t have been able to achieve the quality of his films,” Wenders is sure, “he did a great job.”
However, the real secret of 3D is not being noticed by the film industry and is now almost atrophied, Wenders believes. He knows his stuff, has repeatedly shot in 3D in recent years – short and long films – he knows a lot about the technology behind it and how these films are edited: “It takes more time.” Given the time, the medium the filmmaker loves so much can really unfold.
So why this short film in Hopper’s style by Wim Wenders? Standing in front of a painting, especially a hopper, is just a two-dimensional experience, and photography and film don’t reach the depth that the director wants either. The ability to be drawn into a painting is there, but cannot be compared with the effect of 3D, he emphasizes in the Bastian Gallery in Berlin-Dahlem.
“I think 3D is the medium that gets me closest to what I want to get out of an image.” Wenders wonders again and again how 3D could have been so discredited, discredited as “a child’s language, or even an action language”. Completely wrong, as Wenders’ film proves, because 3D can also be completely different. His hope is that 3D will find more use in art, in museums and galleries, even if things aren’t going so well in the cinema.
Back to Edward Hopper: As a painter who started out as a graphic artist for advertising, as a designer, he was of course familiar with a certain visual language, but initially it had little to do with art. The confidence to finally shape his life as a painter only came at a time when it was pretty much the last thing to paint like Hopper: “Objective” – ??that wasn’t “en vogue” at all. Wenders recalls that no one crowed after him, “he was totally anachronistic in his time.”
Hopper’s “salvation” was being an avid moviegoer. When the “art blockade” got hold of him and he no longer knew what to paint, he went to the cinema every day for a long time. “There must have been around 1,000 films, he watched everything the neighborhood cinema showed,” said Wenders, full of admiration and hardly any surprise. From European art films to American mainstream, Hopper has watched everything – and of course this is reflected in his works. “You can read in his wife’s diaries how often Hopper went to the cinema and what he saw,” says Wenders. This is how the famous picture “Nighthawks” was created.
The other way around, it also turns into a shoe: “How many filmmakers have been influenced by Edward Hopper?” asks Wim Wenders, who definitely counts himself among them. He is concerned with the narrative attitude, it is just pictures that have a story and are not just a snapshot. You can see exactly, something just happened and something else is about to happen. A very rare quality of contemporary art that one sees history and stories, Wenders sums up.
What fascinates Wenders most about “Nighthawks” is the narrative element, the visualization of human loneliness. And what came out of it: Namely, that the cinema gave Edward Hopper a lot, but that Hopper also gave a lot back to the cinema. There is an interesting reciprocal relationship between Hopper, cinema and painting: “I owe a lot to Hopper. I have made countless pilgrimages to this painter, to the Whitney Museum or to MoMa. But in order to really do him justice, I had to shoot this short film essay.”
And so back to the beginning: the film could have been longer. For Wim Wenders, however, he is exactly right, he had resolved from the start that this film should not stand for itself, but that it would make the artist want to be seen. “And this lust for Hopper’s work shouldn’t last an hour,” he laughs. “I’m all right.”
On the occasion of the film’s presentation, Wim Wenders produced three new photographs, which will be shown in his third solo exhibition at Galerie Bastian from January 25 to March 4, 2023.
