Art -----> Film
April 3, 2010 1:11 PM   Subscribe

Help me find art that resembles scenes from movies or evokes the idea of "a movie".

I'm trying to find art (any art: oil, watercolor, photography, younameit) which you might say "looks like film"; for example it may be in the 16:9 aspect ratio, it may depict people engaging in activities, it may be heavy in blue and black hues etc. It may also be none of these things, but the idea is that the art or artist creates work that evokes the idea of a scene from a movie instead of, say a water color or an abstract which may not. Is there an artists that specializes in this kind of thing? ;o) Thanks so much for any contribution or suggestion...
posted by rocco to Media & Arts (17 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
"Nighthawks" By Hopper is the obvious one. It's constantly making it's way into movies and TV.
posted by The Whelk at 1:15 PM on April 3, 2010


Nighthawks
posted by carsonb at 1:16 PM on April 3, 2010


gah!
posted by carsonb at 1:16 PM on April 3, 2010


Cindy Sherman's "Untitled Film Stills"
posted by interrobang at 1:22 PM on April 3, 2010 [1 favorite]




Cindy Sherman's self-portraits are often self-consciously designed to look like stills from (nonexistent) films. See, for example, the Untitled Film Stills series.
posted by googly at 1:23 PM on April 3, 2010


gah!
posted by googly at 1:24 PM on April 3, 2010


The art of Hugh Ferriss always reads like a lost 1930s film still to me, which makes sense cause his work was the inspiration for a ton of movies.
posted by The Whelk at 1:24 PM on April 3, 2010


Cindy Sherman's work is excellent. Someone whose shoots are often compared to movie shoots and the resulting photos have the sort of dramatic feel that many associate with movies is Gregory Crewdson. Another person who has a pretty "filmy" feel, at least in engaging the fantastic in a subtle way, is Jeff Wall.
posted by wooh at 1:32 PM on April 3, 2010


Best answer: Heh, I was coming in to suggest Nighthawks! A lot of Hopper's works look like film stills (NSFW) to me, not sure why.
posted by sallybrown at 1:57 PM on April 3, 2010 [2 favorites]


Another popular reference is Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" - it looks like a still from Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven.

I've always thought that La Charge by André Devambez looked like a still from a movie. A really, really awesome movie.
posted by Bobby Bittman at 2:54 PM on April 3, 2010


I remembered a documentary about Hopper where I'm sure it said he was influenced by the cinema at the time. Googling to check I found this that confirmed it (and that subsequent film makers were influenced by Hopper himself).

There's also this one.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:59 PM on April 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Norwegian artist Unni Askeland made a series of 60 pictures based on stills from the movie "Casablanca". The stills were digitally transfered to canvas. Several of the pictures were later acquired by the National Museum of Art in Oslo.

The photo "Beyond City Limits" by Alwyn Coates was one of the best selling posters for British publisher Athena in the '80s. It looks like a still from a 1950's movie that never existed.

If animated movies are included: almost anything by Peter Max could have been a part of the movie "Yellow Submarine", but according to the Wikipedia article: "Max had nothing to do with the production of Yellow Submarine".
posted by iviken at 3:02 PM on April 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


Jack Vettriano?
posted by scruss at 4:10 PM on April 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


Gregory Crewdson is kind of the standard photographer for this kind of look.
posted by rachums at 6:02 PM on April 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


Bioshock
posted by rbs at 6:40 PM on April 3, 2010


Seconding Jeff Wall. His stuff is amazing. Other artists associated with the Vancouver School (e.g. Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace) would also probably fit your criteria.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 9:40 PM on April 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


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