Wim Wenders finally makes Edward Hopper three-dimensional

The painter Edward Hopper and the cinema are an inseparable couple. The director Wim Wenders and the painter Edward Hopper gradually too. As early as 1977, when Wenders was filming "The American Friend" (starring Dennis Hopper, not related or related by marriage), he hung pictures from a Hopper catalog on the walls of his office as models for the shots in his film. 20 years later, Hopper's painting "Nighthawks" can be found in Wenders' film "At the End of Violence" exactly recreated in one scene. And now Wenders has recreated Hopper's picture "Gas" - and continued.

"Two or Three Things I Know About Edward Hopper" is the name of the 14-minute video that Wenders shot as a commission for the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen near Basel, for their Hopper exhibition in 2020. It had to close quickly when Corona came, and so few saw Wenders' film at the time. This can now be done in the new building of the Bastian Gallery in Berlin-Dahlem, which opened in 2021.

One of the nicest ways to behave in museums is to sit down in front of a painting and empathize with it. Wenders does the same in his video, in the truest sense of the word: "Two or Three Things" is a 3D film. You sit in front of a large screen, put on your glasses - and then you are at this abandoned gas station, three red gas pumps, a half-hidden gas station attendant who is tampering with one. And there is that twilight hour from day to night with its long shadows, which conjures up the most beautiful light – as both painting and cinema know very well.

One can read in Edward Hopper's diaries how often he went to the cinema, more than a thousand times, not only for distraction, but also to overcome the blockages in painting that sometimes gripped him. It was the era of gangster movies morphing into film noir in the early '40s, and that's when the interactions began. In 1942, Hopper painted Nighthawks, and four years later the painting is almost duplicated in The Killer, starring young Burt Lancaster. "Gas" was written in 1940, and one thinks one remembers exactly such a gas station from "Dead Sleeping Tight" (1946), in front of which Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall pull up.

This is most likely a false memory, but at Wenders', a Packard stops at the Hopper's pump, just as Bogart drove it. The perspective pans 90 degrees, the painting comes to life, the gas station attendant plugs in the nozzle. The driver stays in the car, the female passenger gets out and smokes a cigarette – in the foreground on the right of the picture, which in its gradations of depth stands in front of us in 3D.

There is probably no director who has made more films in 3-D than Wenders – eleven at last count – and therefore there is no one who would understand the technology better. Not as a flavor enhancer for action films like the Hollywood producers who have given the three-dimensional a bad reputation, but as a well-considered design tool.

Wim Wenders, who had a fictional Vermeer painted for his film “Until the End of the World”, does not presume to interpret Hopper, who is always open to many interpretations. At best, he only touches on stories. Things are probably not going well between the couple who pulled up. When the two are gone again, the gas station attendant leans against a pillar and stares at the lengthening shadows of the forest in the background, they are probably the long shadows of his life that is drawing to a close.

There are more still life paintings in Wenders' film, Morning Sun and Summer Evening, or landscapes that look like Hopper should have painted them. Three of the film motifs can be seen in the gallery as 3D photographs. Wenders' 3-D fires our imagination without restricting it, without transplanting it into modern contexts, as is often done with iconic images today. And this 3-D opens up a space somewhere between cinema and painting that is rarely entered.

Wim Wenders, „Two or Three Things I Know About Edward Hopper“, bis 4. März, Galerie Bastian, Berlin