Panned by the critics. Watch it anyway….
Tag: Film
hollowing out reality
Marty told me that soon people would only read books electronically. “This is so crap,” I said. “Stuff like that is hollowing out reality. Books and records and films are being thrown away and digitized into a world you can never physically enter. The children of the future will just sit around in empty white rooms.” “White Wall Kids,” my brother interjected. “Good name for a band.” I frowned. “You used to have to wait for a film to be developed. But it wasn’t just the photos we loved, it was the anticipation of finally holding them in your hands.”
~ Benedict Wells, The End of Loneliness: A Novel (Penguin Books, January 29, 2019)
Photo: Developing Photograph is a photograph by Victor De Schwanberg
Hopper, in films…forget the words. Watch. (90 sec)
Over the years we’ve brought you a handful of video essays about the relationship between visual and cinematic art, how directors will borrow from famous paintings and sculptures in their framing, but never before have we brought you such an essay that focuses exclusively on the influence of one artist. Thanks to editor Ignacio Montalvo, however, now we can.
Edward Hopper is one of the most famous American artists of the 20th century. A native New-Yorker, Hopper was a realist whose work was centered around depictions of modern American life, like a starker sort of Norman Rockwell, a man not afraid to show the shadows blended into the everyday. His most famous work, Nighthawks, a simple late-nite diner scene from 1942, has been recreated time and time again in film, television, and graphic print, but that’s just one of the artist’s many paintings that have appealed to filmmakers over the years. In episode eight of the new Twin Peaks, an episode many, myself included, consider one of the most artistic achievements the medium has ever known, Lynch makes no less than three direct visual references to Hopper’s work, which in his hands become perversions of the American dream.
Many other filmmakers have also interpreted Hopper through their personal perspectives, ranging from the innocent to the corrupt, realistic to farcical, and severe to lighthearted. Press play above to start your tour through the Movie Museum of Edward Hopper.
~ H. Perry Horton, “Framed: The Influence of Artist Edward Hopper on Contemporary Cinema” from Film School Rejects, August 8, 2017
Related Posts: Edward Hopper
Memories
Jackie
Ms. Portman’s Jackie is a mesmerizing presence. She is stiff the way celebrated women were in the early 1960s, in her comportment as well as her hair. […]
Natalie Portman’s portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy during and immediately after her husband’s assassination rises above impersonation to an eerie kind of incarnation: She’s got the voice, the look and a devastated spirit that still has plenty of steel…For those who remember exactly where they were when the news came in, some of these blood-soaked images retain the power to evoke astonishingly strong feelings of shock and grief. This is by way of saying I may have seen a different “Jackie” than others will see, one that made me recoil at replayed moments of horror, and sometimes squirm like a voyeur. But Pablo Larraín has made a strangely conflicted film that portrays Jackie as an obsessive mythmaker and keeper of the flame—an ironic, provocative approach—yet celebrates the Camelot myth in the process. […]
Does it also feel right that the film, following Jackie back to the White House after the flight from Dallas, tracks her solitary wanderings through silent, empty rooms and into the shower, where she washes her husband’s dried blood from her body? No and yes. Some of that left me feeling queasy, an accessory to a break-in on an icon’s privacy. All the same, following her in the hours after the assassination is a terrific idea for part of a movie, a part that’s irresistible to watch…
The film’s contradictions intersect most vividly toward the end, when Jackie, passing a department store in a limousine, sees mannequins in a succession of windows wearing her signature dresses. That could also be taken as ironic—the architect of the image-building project has become its surviving subject. But the scene, like so much in the film, plays sentimentally. She is ruefully, tragically alone…
~ Joe Morgenstern, excerpts from ‘Jackie’ Review: The Woman and the Myth. Natalie Portman stars as Jacqueline Kennedy in the period during and after her husband’s assassination
To watch official movie trailer: Jackie, Official Trailer
Photo: traileraddict.com