Art & Film: Hopper/Malick

From the canvas to the cinema.

David Liu | 21 January 2012

House by the Railroad (Edward Hopper, 1925; oil on canvas)

Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

The year is 1916. Bill, Abby and Linda ride the rails from Chicago to the Texas Panhandle, where they work as farmhands on the wheat harvest. Looming over the spacious fields, the farmer’s Victorian mansion evokes both grandeur and solitude. Like Hopper, Malick frames his edifice as an indelible yet impenetrable monument of American enterprise.