Last night I discovered an interesting connection. Road to Perdition is one of my favourite movies. The Wikipedia says — "To establish the lighting of scenes in Road to Perdition, Mendes drew from the paintings of Edward Hopper as a source of inspiration, particularly Hopper's New York Movie (1939)". Mendes is Sam Mendes !
The cinematography in Road to Perdition was done by Conrad Hall who won a total of three Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, the last one of which came posthumously for Road to Perdition.
Road to Perdition is a cinematic marvel. I still remember being in awe of the movie after I watched it and thinking about how brilliant the cinematography was. Then, when I read about the movie a little more, I came to know that a lot of people feel about it the same way. I guess I have some knack for appreciating good art. One of the scenes is etched in my memory forever. The scene where Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) kills John Rooney (Paul Newman) is one of the finest pieces of cinematography ever done (In my humble opinion !).
So last night, after, I googled Edward Hopper and saw a few paintings of him. A few paintings seemed familiar. I had seen them before. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out where I had seen them. In December 2020, I had come across an artcile, "The Spanish 1918 Flu and the COVID-19 Disease: The Art of Remembering and Foreshadowing Pandemics" by Joseph L.Goldstein, Nobel laureate in physiology in 1985. Goldstein discusses how the works of art serve as a tool to remember as well as foreshadow pandemics or any other tragedy. He discusses how Edvard Munch, after surviving Spanish Flu, depicted his experience in a painting, "Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu". Munch's most famous work is "The Scream".
Goldstein elaborates upon the work of Edward Hopper with regards to COVID-19. I will reproduce Goldstein's take on Hopper's work.
Cape Cod Morning (1950)
Goldstein's interpretaion of the above painting: "In the painting entitled Cape Cod Morning, a woman gazes out of the bay window, her arms tense and her grip locked tight on the table in front of her. Her focus is forward and to the outside world, yet she seems imprisoned in her own home, anxiously staring toward an uncertain future and hoping that the lockdown will end soon".
That is certainly an interesting take but this is only one of the interpretations of the work and the not the objective truth. An art's interpretation is slave to the intellectual history and disposition of the observer. I don't know about the original motivations of Hopper and his own view of this work, what led him to paint this or what he thought of it after the work was finished.
I can have my own interpretation of this work. In my opinion, this could very well describe a woman in rural America waiting for her husband or her young son to return home who has been missing in action. It has been five years since the end of the World War 2. She wakes up every morning to look out of the window and probe the horizon in the hope that her son/husband might be walking towards her. My interpretation can be completely wrong as I have zero knowledge about rural America, its vegetation, the types of homes they have over there. Do they even have these windows in rural American homes? I brought in World War 2 only because this painting is from 1950 and that seemed a reasonable assumption to make.
Nevertheless, Goldstein's interpretation is very interesting for our times.
I can have my own interpretation of this work. In my opinion, this could very well describe a woman in rural America waiting for her husband or her young son to return home who has been missing in action. It has been five years since the end of the World War 2. She wakes up every morning to look out of the window and probe the horizon in the hope that her son/husband might be walking towards her. My interpretation can be completely wrong as I have zero knowledge about rural America, its vegetation, the types of homes they have over there. Do they even have these windows in rural American homes? I brought in World War 2 only because this painting is from 1950 and that seemed a reasonable assumption to make.
Nevertheless, Goldstein's interpretation is very interesting for our times.
Car Chair (1965)
Goldstein's interpretation of the above painting: "Traveling by train or airplane is typically conducive to conversations and interactions among the passengers. But that is not the case in Hopper’s painting entitled Chair Car (1965), in which four travelers are shown inside a commuter train. The inside space is dreary with no decorations. The travelers appear isolated from one another, each lost within his or her own world. The painting evokes a feeling of cold unpleasantness that anticipates our current practice of social distancing".
I don't have my own interpretation of this as of now !
Acknowledgement: The paintings have been taken from WIKIARTS.
