Picture Edward Hopper’s famous diner: Midnight, a dark glass window viewed from the outside, and four people inside… Nobody is talking to anyone; everyone is buried in their own solitude. The title of the painting is Nighthawks, the year is 1942.
Since that date, countless directors have passed by that diner. Some slowed their pace and peered through the glass; others opened the door and walked right inside.
The relationship between cinema and painting is far too deep to fit into a simple word like “influence.” Sometimes a director stands before a painting, and a light suddenly flashes in their mind. Other times, the opposite happens; a film frame stands before a canvas, and the brush begins to speak. This is an uninterrupted, two-way flow between two art forms.
A Diner in the Middle of the Night
Hopper is probably the painter whose door cinema knocks on the most. Herbert Ross brought Nighthawks to the screen almost verbatim in his 1981 film Pennies from Heaven: the lighting is the same, the color palette is the same, that uncanny distance between people is the same. Wim Wenders paid a lengthy homage to the painting in The End of Violence. In 2013, Gustav Deutsch took things a step further with Shirley: Visions of Reality. Thirteen Hopper paintings frame the life of a fictional actress; every scene takes place inside a different painting, and the camera never steps outside that frame.
The solitude depicted by Hopper is almost a ready-made visual language for cinema. A solitary figure sitting by a window, an empty street, or cold fluorescent lighting… These create their own narrative without needing extra editing. A director looks at the painting and knows: someone else has already carved the emotion they were looking for onto the canvas.
When the Director Stands Before the Painting
Sofia Coppola nods to Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon in Marie Antoinette; with the scene of the rearing horse and red cape, she casts the shadow of male power over the queen’s world. Coppola does the same in the opening of Lost in Translation: that iconic initial scene where Scarlett Johansson stands with her back turned is the exact cinematic equivalent of the composition in John Kacere’s painting Jutta.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers presents this interaction in its most elegant form. With her long black gloves and pitch-black backdrop, Isabelle transforms herself into a living statue of the Venus de Milo. The moment Matthew says, “I’ve always wanted to make love to the Venus de Milo,” Isabelle transforms into art with her own body. This single scene is the sculpted summary of all the cinematic references Bertolucci makes to Godard, Garbo, and that famous running scene in the Louvre Museum.
Kubrick used Van Gogh’s painting depicting prisoners in a circular yard in A Clockwork Orange; Tarantino turned Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy inside out in Django Unchained. These references rarely appear in the credits, but eyes that understand cinematic language recognize them instantly.
Reverse Direction: When Film Lands on Canvas
However, this traffic of inspiration does not flow in only one direction.
Painter Peter Doig is someone who transfers film stills found on old videocassettes onto his canvases. The escape onto the lake scene in Friday the 13th—that frozen moment of terror—is the direct source for Doig’s key works. Doig uses cinema as a “cultural memory bank”: he pulls an image etched into the minds of millions and resurrects it on canvas.
Cindy Sherman did something else in her Untitled Film Stills series produced in the late 1970s. She embodied female figures from film noir, Italian Neorealism, and the French New Wave in her own body. But she didn’t imitate existing movies; she photographed stills from films that were never made. The result was brilliant: scenes you have never watched, yet feel as though you have seen somewhere before… If Sherman is one of the most important figures in visual culture critique today, she owes it partly to reading the codes of cinema so exceptionally well.
Accident or Citation?
The most fascinating part of it all is that not every reference is intentional.
Remember Leeloo’s iconic bandage costume in The Fifth Element. Designed by Jean Paul Gaultier, this piece is frequently compared to Frida Kahlo’s painting The Broken Column. Kahlo had turned the plaster corset supporting her spine after her severe accident into a painting; Gaultier’s costume is visually almost identical to that corset.
However, the story told by actress Milla Jovovich about the costume is entirely different: the idea stemmed from a simple hospital gown. In the scene where Leeloo is recreated in the laboratory, it was necessary to cover her body while preserving functionality; Gaultier combined this idea with his own aesthetic of “making underwear into outerwear.”
So, which one is true? Probably both. What we call an “unintentional quotation” in art history is precisely this: two artists at different times feeding off the same visual memory without knowing it. Both Kahlo and Gaultier drank from the same cultural well; the only difference between them is intention.
No:26 Note
A painting is a moment frozen in time; a film is a sequence of images flowing through time. But at their core, both are after the exact same thing: capturing and entombing an emotion, a glance, or a moment.
Looking at a painting, the director thinks, “Someone has already painted this emotion.” Looking at a film still, the painter says, “This image is already etched into the minds of millions.” Both feed off the same immense memory.
Perhaps the real point isn’t who stole from whom, but rather both having the courage to look at the exact same point.
