"Hop" into Noir.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: REEL WORLD - Edward Hopper and film noir

NOTHING is created in a vacuum. For instance, the visual inspiration of Bob Fosse's "Cabaret" (1972) was influenced heavily by the caricaturist drawings of German artist George Grosz. His work has come to represent the decadent days of the Weimar Republic caught in amber. Thus, when one of my books addressed this subject, I included reproductions of Grosz's blase cabaret patrons in "The Relicts" (1921), as well as "The Ballroom" (1929), whose floozy party girl was the template for Fosse's Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli).

Sometimes, my own writing or teaching of film also can be so connected. For instance, a text I did on Charlie Chaplin and dark comedy was inspired by Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" (1937). The catalyst for Picasso's abstracted painting of death and destruction was his outrage over the German bombing of the village of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. Since this conflict was part of the motivation for Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" (1940), I decided to do a book on the filmmaker's shifting dark comedy perspective on war in "Dictator" versus two of his other films, "Shoulder Arms" (1918) and "Monsieur Verdoux" (1947).

As for the most film-impacting American painter, from my perspective, it has to be Edward Hopper. His works have contributed to defining individual films as well as being a major factor in the formation of a genre--film noir. Indeed, a sort of Zeitgeist occurred in the 1940s between his paintings, particularly his signature work "Nighthawks" (1942, the now often-spoofed picture of three late-night cafe diners), and the birth of this new type of city-at-night genre--think Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, coupled with Hopper's striking use of light and dark.

Linking Hopper with noir is best articulated by noted film historian Foster Hirsch in The Dark Side of the Screen (1981). He described an example of the genre as having "... no sense of life outside the frame; all exterior scenes are stripped of any sense of the city density and rhythm. The film's unpopulated streets, the elongated shadows, the angular buildings that guard empty space like grim sentinels, recall the eerie night-time cityscapes in the painting of Edward Hopper." Moreover, Martin Scorsese has expressed similar Hopper links to fellow director Robert Wise's noirish "The Set-Up" (1949), about boxing's shady underside.

Ironically, while Hopper painted in color (obviously), when film noir was at its zenith in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the...