Film noir is defined as “a style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace.”
The central characters in film noir are often gangsters, detectives and a femme fatale.
Hopper’s paintings are also characterized by “a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace.”
Nighthawks, 1942, is his most famous painting. (The Art Institute of Chicago snatched it up as soon as its paint was dry and it is, along with Grant Wood’s American Gothic, one of the reasons people go to the AI.)
It’s not a Norman Rockwell family scene, is it? Two guys in fedoras and a skinny redhead in a red dress, smokin’ and drinkin’ coffee way past midnight. What kind of characters are these? A gangster, a gum shoe and a dame? Sounds about right to me.
Film noir drew them in from the late 20’ to the 50’s. The look of the genre became stylized and predictable. When any art is worked out according to a formula, it can only crank out material for so long before it invites satire and parody.
As does Hopper:
Ten years after Nighthawk, Edward Hopper was still working with his wooden, predictable formula. Here’s Morning Sun from 1952 and a parody I gleaned from the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 