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.

Notes on Evolution: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

David Liu | 31 December 2011

From Zodiac’s restless journalists and detectives to Seven’s ruthless killer, from Edward Norton’s white-collar waif in Fight Club to the troubled young entrepreneurs of The Social Network, the heroes and antiheroes of David Fincher’s films are forces of nature, obsessive and meticulous to a fault. Their hunger for progression and distaste for established norms reflect common psychological impulses connecting the director’s body of work.

It’s no stretch to say that Fincher revisits familiar territory with his latest The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The film begins by giving us snapshots of the physically scarred, emotionally neutered Lisbeth Salander, played brilliantly by Rooney Mara. As her relationship with journalist Mikael Blomkvist develops, Salander evolves into a fascinating contradiction — alternating between cool detachment and feral intensity, she comes to embody both spectrums of the “Fincherian” archetype.

The more of Fincher’s films we experience (and experience again), the more they seem to share the same dialectical universe. Every line of dialogue, gesture and expression springs from an unconsummated desire for fulfillment, fragments of colossal puzzles that straddle the divide between revelation and oblivion.

Closing Shots: David Fincher

A collection of final shots from the works of David Fincher.

David Liu | 18 December 2011

Read more »

A Cinephile’s Instinctive Travels: Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

Reliving the people and places I encounter through the sights and sounds of the films they inspired.  

David Liu | 14 August 2011

Read more »