Shirley: Visions of Reality2015
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Member Reviews (4)
Fascinating more for its reconstruction of Edward Hopper's paintings than for the story created to connect them. Often, the movement of the actors seem to create new paintings within the frames, like a slow persistence of vision. Though virtually static, a riveting visually experience.
If you like and/or love Hooper, you'll enjoy this movie.
This is a wonderful movie. It helps if you have obsessed at least a bit over Edward Hopper. (Think the diner of "Nighthawks" and realize that you actually have done so.) This movie takes the painter's 2 dimensional representation of 3 dimensional reality and reverses it. It's a 3 dimensional moving representation of Hopper's 2 dimensional unmoving painting. The overlap of the two is done cleverly and always surprisingly well. The actress moves from one frozen representation to the next, with her three dimensionality always surprising. The 13 scenes are separated by a black screen with the next date and a reproduction of Dos Passos' "newsreal" separations of chapters in his "USA" trilogy. These are also flattened and frozen, in comparison to their vibrancy and movement on the printed page.
The sets for each scene are striking in their flatness, and the eye concludes that many or most of the shadows and angles have been faked in paint. Then Shirley moves in or out of the flatness. Wow!
(A year or 2 later -- Reading about Hopper I discover the fact that he always used his wife as his model, with no exceptions. Knowing this gives a different bit of structure to the film, which isn't really need but gives you another dimension to think about. DE)
I like both Gustav Deutsch and Edward Hopper, so I was expecting to be entranced by the film. The visuals were impressive and interesting, but for me, couldn't carry the overwrought narrative. Nice idea which didn't click.