What do the people in Edward Hopper's paintings think of, these figures who usually stand or sit alone in the paintings, accompanied only by their shadows and always wandering around, even if they are accompanied, and appear as if they were themselves in felt like strangers in their own bedrooms?

What moves you, what do you dream of?

The answer that Wim Wenders, film director and, as a photographer, a self-confessed admirer of Edward Hopper for decades, gave almost three years ago is this: you dream of the surface of the images becoming space;

and that they could then get up and step out of their rigid positions and into a world that looked everywhere like it was painted by Hopper.

Claudius Seidl

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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"Two or Three Things I Know about Edward Hopper" is the name of the film that Wenders staged in a 3D technique that doesn't make much fuss about itself as a contribution to a Hopper exhibition in Basel, with enormous effort and yet enjoyable twenty minutes short – and the first thing you know about Edward Hopper afterwards as a viewer is that at the edges of each Hopper painting the next Hopper picture begins.

Because that's the plot of Wenders' film: the characters start moving, the camera accompanies them.

As soon as it pans or moves a little further, we are in the next Hopper picture.

One could argue, of course, that the immobility of Hopper's figures, the rigid posture with which a woman sunbathes on her bed in the afternoon light, or the quiet thoughtfulness with which a young woman in a café looks at her cup - that this immobility is what really matters the condition for this is that the inner movement becomes visible.

But maybe that's just an argument for looking at Hopper's pictures for themselves, and not an argument against Wenders' attempt to revive them.

One could also object that all this is too beautiful, too perfect, too artistic and without any aesthetic barbs - especially since the young Wenders once insisted that the art of cinema is not the juxtaposition of beautiful images, but the complete opposite.

Then Wenders and young Handke drove through ugly Munich suburbs, longing for the wide open spaces of America and insisting that if cinema needed any outside inspiration at all, it could only be rock music.

But if you think back to Wenders' great films, to "American Friend", to "Hammett" or "Paris, Texas", then it also turns out that there is a certain hopper-like quality, a love of slowness, of even standing still and too that light that casts long shadows and saturates the colors of which belonged to the strongest attractions.

So when he goes the opposite way for a short film, from standstill to movement, then that's actually logical.

And that the camera becomes a tool of enchantment is nothing to blame him for.

Two or three things he knows from Hopper: You can also look at the film in such a way that the best way to uncover the secret of art is to reconstruct it, i.e. examine the material conditions of its production: What would the focal length of this be? Pictures, where are the lamps, why does Hopper choose which cadrage?

Hopper didn't just look at the world with the naked eye, he went to the cinema and then tried to wrest a snapshot from the magic.

Out of the infinity of these relationships between the world, art and cinema, what is the dream of all art lovers then happens: that at night, when the museums close, the works climb out of the frames.

At Wenders you can finally watch and don't have to wait until midnight.

It's a German premiere if the Bastian gallery in Berlin is showing this film now.

So far it has only been on public view as part of the Hopper exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler.

Because collectors of video art can only buy one copy of the film (price on request), Wenders has included three photographs (editions of 2 and 1 artist's copy, 9,520 to 33,220 euros).

They are images that recreate the images of the film that recreates Hopper's paintings: triple mirrored in the cinephile's hope that truth and beauty lie somewhere in between.

Wim Wenders: Two or Three Things I Know about Edward Hopper.

Galerie Bastian, Berlin, until March 4th