Luzes e sombras da noite: os olhares pictóricos e cinematográficos de Edward Hopper, Vittorio Storaro e Henri Alekan

Resumo (EN)

My area of professional interest and work practice is cinema; and, more precisely, the cinematography. This present research, in the first stage, raises questions about the intermidiality between painting, photography and cinema. The reflection on the environments that populate my cinematographic imaginary - paintings, science, narrative and the luminous energy of the film show itself - led me to elaborate the question of my research: how to construct the visual representation of nocturnal scenes through the use of Language in audiovisual productions? Following the previous considerations, this study, in a second stage, deals with the look of the artist Edward Hopper – an American painter of the twentieth century, considered the “painter of solitude“ – on the night. The vision and representation at night in his works. The drawing of lights and shadows, the performance of his pictorial imagery in function of the atmosphere and the nocturnal scenarios. In contrast to Hopper, the vision of two directors of photography, the Italian Vittorio Storaro and the French Henri Alekan, is analyzed under the same scenario of the dramatization and staging of the night. The two professionals of the cinematographic image expose their interpretive mode, combining technique, creativity and expression, on the reproduction and representation of the nocturnal scenes. Through the evaluation of the works and ideas of these three artists, these pages lead us to the understanding that audiovisual images of nocturnal scenes are constructed, not in order to recreate the actual “physical“ situation of these scenes. Rather a combination of codes inherited from other visual languages, such as engraving and painting, in combination with a visual syntax approach that draws on knowledge of the physiology and perceptual mechanisms of the human visual apparatus.